Reptile & Amphibian Forums

my question is...do hets from totaly different blood lines still have the same chance of producing and Albino or are there different types of Albino? can someone take the time to go into a little detail on this.....many thaks Lorie xxx.

As far as anyone's guess, all albino balls are compatable.
Long ago, when Herpoculture was in it's infancy, people were breeding unrelated animals together and getting normal looking offspring. For example, if one would purchase an albino California Kingsnake from Arizona, and another one from New York, bred them together, in most cases you would get normal looking offspring, but today we know those animals would be hets (carriers) for double trait albino. What had happen was each of those adult animals had the ablino (gene) on a different chromosone. They didn't match up..... but the offspring then had two different chromsones that carrierd the trait.
The most famous story I was witness to, was someone with an albino Western Diamondback Rattlesnake. After years of searching, he finally found another person with one, and spent tons of money to aquire the other speicmen. He bred them both together and got normal offspring. He came to the conclusion that the albino gene did not carry.... and he sold off the pair rather cheaply. We all know what happen next.... the buyers bred back the offspring to the adjanct parents , and albino Western Diamondbacks became aviable to the buying public.
There are still albino balls coming in from Africa, are these related to the ones that are already here? If these were bred together would you get albinos? That is the two thousand, five hundred dollar question.

As far as I know, all lines of common albino (what some people call tyrosinase negative albino) in ball pythons are compatible. However, this does not include other albino type mutations such as carmel albino and lavender albino. It is not yet known if those mutations are compatible with the common albino gene. I know of a couple of breedings where the lavender albino gene was combined with the common albino gene but all the eggs were infertile (I think it was Ralph Davis who did this) I don't know if anyone has tried breeding common albino and carmel albino together yet, or carmel and lavender together. (you know, now that you mention it, a Carmel X Lavender might look pretty cool) Hopefully someone will do that this year and let us all know the results.

Mark

>>my question is...do hets from totaly different blood lines still have the same chance of producing and Albino or are there different types of Albino? can someone take the time to go into a little detail on this.....many thaks Lorie xxx.