Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have been looking at various websites and finding that some colour combos seem to produce inherited defects in health as well as a colour difference.
I read that lucy gators seem to die from liver disease alot, also in cats the vast majority of white cats with blue eyes are born deaf. this seems to be a big problem in dalmation dogs too.
Do we know of any genetic problems that seem to come up with BP morphs? Does the colour defect effect appitite/sex drive/aggression/other abnormalities?? I read that some caramels are coming out kinked, spiders spinning, pieds not growing/breeding ect. This has been put down to many things including incubation temps/humidity/interbreeding but could it be that other genes are being effected when a snakes colour/pattern is abnormal?

It seems logical that there would be some concerns. With all the inbreeding and breeding back that happens you'd think that some problems would occur. Tho maybe snakes aren't genetically advanced enough for those types of concerns. Who knows, it'd be interesting to hear some feedback on this.
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Tosha

8.8.0 Ball Python (Harry and Fluffy and currently un-named)
0.2.0 Feline (Pippen and Pandora)
0.0.1 Dessert Tortoise (Pope)
7.9.5 Fish (1,2,3,4...)
0.0.1 Frog rescued from pool skimmer
0.0.2 Lizards rescued from pool skimmer

Snakes are no less genetically evolved than humans and are just as susceptible to genetic abnormalities as we are. Sexual reproduction is a nearly univesal process aimed at diversifying the gene pool. When we side step that fact by back breeding and line breeding it can and will lead to problems in almost every organism. If you read almost any ecology or genetics textbook, you will find that most organisms have found a way to keep from interbreeding within its own gene pool. It may be that they will not be attracted to each other, or that the all the males will travel far from home, while the females stay in one location or vice versa, or a variety of other mechanisms come into play to keep interbreeding from happening naturally. Seems pretty likely there is a reason for this...like concentrating recessive genes within a group is bad (unless it is an expensive morph gene)...hmmm

people have run into problems with this already, but luckily there are usually several different lines of established morphs, so it is not necessary to interbreed within the same line. If you are doing anything besides trying to prove out a recessive mutation, you should try to avoid back or line breeding. This is not as big of a problem with dominant and codom genes, since lots of diversity has been breed into these lines from various normal x dominant breedings.

From the evidence I've seen posted it sure looks to me like both the caramel kinking and the spider spinning are some how linked to the actual mutant gene and not due to inbreeding concentrating separate genes causing these problems.

I've heard reports of lots of the original imported caramels being kinked as well as kinks from captive breedings involving possible hets (i.e. outbred). I’ve not heard of any kinking in the non caramel siblings either. If the kinking was caused by genes other than the caramel genes in those lines it should show up just as often in the het and possible het siblings of caramels.

Being dominant, spider is probably one of the most outbred morphs there is yet the condition seems to continue to show up from time to time. There are probably lots of spiders out there that are the result of several consecutive generations of outbreeding with no captive inbreeding at all.

Now it's still possible that outbreeding might stumble on genes that can compensate for these problems but it doesn't seem that inbreeding is causing either.

I'm less sure of what, if anything, might be going on with pied. However, with the sporadic het pied marker and the high initial price I believe a heck of a lot of outbreeding has already gone into that line (i.e. het males and even possible het males X normal females). If there is a problem I would again tend to wonder if it's a side effect of the piebald gene it's self and not due to inbreeding concentrating independent negative genes.

I'm not saying we will never have an inbreeding problem, I've just not seen any evidence of one in ball pythons yet. Not really surprising considering they have only been captive bred in any real number for 10 years or less and there are still 10's of thousands of wild bred animals exported from Africa every year.

I'm pretty sure blue eyed lucy snakes are deaf .

LOL if you're thinkin' what I think you're thinkin', I think you're right.

Quig

Snakes have an internal ear, and studies have shown they can hear airborn sounds.

Eric
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www.ESReptiles.com

That's cool. I was aware that they had an internal ear, but not that they'd been proven funcional. Guess we're never to old ta learn.

Quig