Reptile & Amphibian Forums

...maybe!
I produced this baby in '03 by breeding a male het pied (with
the markers people are always looking for) to a normal female.
Approximately 1/2 of my babies came out with the belly markings.
Does this *prove* anything about the 'het markers'? No is does NOT.
However, it does add credibility to it in my book. We will see...

This female is technically a 50% het pied (female). I believe
this to be a pretty extreme example of what people are looking
for in belly markings for het pieds. Several of the other 50%
het babies also had similar markings, but some not nearly as
extreme. I also have heard from LOTS of other people that they
have proved out hets that do NOT have the markers. So, like I
said...the markers don't mean anything for certain. It could
just be that it is a totally independant characteristic.

Note: Once again...I'm not saying she is a het. However, if I
was a betting man...

Let me know what you think.
Chris Simone
SimoneReptiles

I had a 7 egg clutch this year from breeding a poss het pied male to his daughter, both showed the markings and all the babies showed the markings, but no pieds...

Rich Macias

7 eggs from het to het only have an about 87% chance of producing a homozygous (i.e. maybe you where just the unlucky 13%). Of course if your marker is for real you where lucky not to get any non hets out of 7 (it works out that there was the same 87% chance of at least one non het and 13% chance of all being hets or better).

IMHO the marker shows up too much in pied lines to be random. There seem to be plenty of cases of hets without the marker so obviously it isn't perfect. The big question is if there are look-alike non hets.

Of course it's a huge can of worms for those selling possible hets. I think possible hets in general are a great thing for entry-level breeders on a budget. It looks to me like reputable breeders of pieds have tried to make the sale of possible hets as fair as possible through things like selling whole clutches together or selling groups of markered and non markered babies in specific ratios.

However I'm glad to see the information about the marker discussed publicly the last few years because there has always been the potential for a shady breeder to keep the markered possible het girls back for himself of his friends and only offer the unmarkered ones to the general public as the full advertised chance possible hets. If there is anything to the marker at all the remaining non markered possible hets sold to the general public would have lower than the advertised chance of being hets. For example, out of 1000 50% possible hets about 500 will be hets. If 300 of them have the marker and it's reliable enough to raise their chances of being hets even just to 80% (I suspect it would be higher than that) then you have 240 hets in the markered group. That only leaves 260 hets in the remaining 700 unmarkered possible hets for 37% hets. In this example they are only the full 50% possible hets as a group before the markered animals are picked out. Only a random selection from the entire group is truly a 50% chance. If the marker shows up in more than 60% of the hets or is accurate at more than 80% of the time when seen (the conservative numbers I picked for this example) then the remaining odds on the non markered animals will be even worse. Sure it's a headache to deal with but we don't get to pick the way the genes actually work, only the information that we share and discuss to try to handle it as fairly as possible.

So where is the marker that I am suppose to be looking at? I don't know what the marker is suppose to look like? Please inform.

Thanks
Jason

Does this count as a Marker Trait? =)

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"I don't know about you...but I find comfort in that." -- Cowboy

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Chad Bachman

Yeah. Unfortunately she's just a Normal. Kinda why I'm still on the fence about this whole market trait fad. Who knows?

Chris =)
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"I don't know about you...but I find comfort in that." -- Cowboy

Have you bred her to a pied or pied het yet?

She has nice width to the white belly and the black edges even if they are broken up a little. There should be hundreds of hets in the tens of thousands of ch imported every year.

Nope. She's only 250 grams right now. She's very beautiful, though. She's a deep rich merlot with copper-gold bands. Really pretty. She's been off feed for some time now. Starting to get worried...like all newbies. =)

Chris =)
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"I don't know about you...but I find comfort in that." -- Cowboy

Any of them can have it, (even normals) but if I was buying poss het pieds I would go for the ones with the marks (not that it means the others aren't hets). I have some normals, and a het albino that have the same belly pattern as the one you posted, and they are not het pieds either.
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Chad Bachman

np

show people that all day, and they will still come here tomorrow & ask what the markers look like...LOL

Nice snake BTW.
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Chad Bachman

This is a female that I got 5 offspring from this year. Three of them show almost the same belly pattern. Maybe they are separate genes but just happened to coincide with some piebalds? I'm just trying to figure out what is going on with her. Sorry about the picture quality. I'm still using film and I'm taking belly shots of the babies tonight.

I know, same ol' pictures!

It's nice and wide (looks like all three belly scales white). She has some breaks but the ones I've produced (none proven het yet) do vary in quality. Interesting that yours looks better near the front and not near the tail so maybe she’s something else. I'd definitely try to breed her back to a son with it if possible. If you don't have one big enough maybe you can find a markered pied line male to breed her to this year just in case.

It certainly could be a separate gene causing the marker but I'm thinking it's too common in the pied lines for it to be completely unrelated. That still doesn't rule out a linked (same chromosome) but separate gene that would tend to stay with the pied gene. However, the pied pictures I've seen seem to show the white coming up from the belly. Add to that the two black lines in the "normal" areas of a pied perhaps corresponding to the two black lines at the edge of the belly in the markered ones and I can sort of see the marker being the beginning of pied starting to creep up from the belly. I'm far from proving it but my suspicion is that the marker is caused by the pied gene it's self. Why a single pied gene doesn't always cause the marker I don't know. It’s like it couldn’t make up it’s mind if it wanted to be co-dominant or recessive.

I'd breed her back to one, but all her offspring were females.
I don't think that she's a het pied, but there are some similarites with the marker snakes and she did pass something on. I looked at the babies again to try to compare and take belly pictures of them, and I realized that their belly stripes (solid stripes with all white in between) actually run along the edges of the middle scale. Weird. One has a completely normal checkered black belly, and all the babies from the other clutch with the same father have normal bellies too. I'll post pics when I develop them. Who knows? As long as her weight's good (which shouldn't be a problem - she eats everything I put in with her), she'll be bred to a pastel this year. That's assuming that the little guy is up to the task...