Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Ok I know its done. I also know that it does not affect reptiles like it does mammals and that virtually every morph is inbred to some extent. My question is, how much inbreeding is safe? I have a brother/sister pair (blood and amel blood). I also have a grouchy husband that wants me to keep my snakey numbers low so I cant get alot of new blood. I want to breed this pair but I am not sure how safe it would be to breed any offspring THEY produce in the future.

Most people are 100% either way on inbreeding as in one time is 100% wrong with others saying you could do it 100 generations and they would not care.... But my answer is, this one pair should be ok it is usually when you breed the parents together, then the children together and there children and theirs, etc etc. It is when there has been no new blood introduced in many generations that you see problems.
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0.1 Snow Corn "Hope"
1.0 Redtail "Kilo"
1.0 Ball Python "Road Hog"
1. Orange Albino Black Ratsnake "Chunk" (Goonies)
.1 Orange Albino Black Ratsnake "Peaches" (Didn't name her!)

Short answer: It depends.

Long answer: Inbreeding is only bad insofar as it tends to cause defective genes to concentrate and tends to expose recessive traits which are detrimental to a cornsnake's health. If your cornsnake pair isn't het for any of these bad genes, you could inbreed them to your heart's content and never see any health problems. Unfortunately, nobody knows what the vast majority of these bad genes are, and sometimes these bad genes are only bad if a second or third bad gene is expressed along with them. Thus, there's no way to tell how many generations you can safely inbreed a line of snakes before you'll start to have noticable health problems.

In general, the more genes two cornsnakes have in common, the more likely it is that something nasty will be uncovered if it exists. To combat this, most breeders practice outcrossing. Some outcross every other generation, some outcross every generation, and some every three.

Along those lines, two sibling cornsnakes (statistically speaking) have more genes in common with eachother than with either parent. So, on average, it's safer to breed a cornsnake back to it's sire or dam than to its sibling.

On the subject of mammalian inbreeding... A while back (several years), Discover Magazine had an article on a family of humans (living in the US, and I don't mean Arkansas) who had been marrying their cousins for many generations and had developed no problems from this to date. Meanwhile, there's a tribe on some island somewhere that is having severe issues due to inbreeding. Long story short, it all depends on whether those bad genes are hiding there in the first place. If they're not, inbreeding is not all that bad. If they are... inbreeding can be very bad.

-Kat
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"You keep WHAT in your freezer?"
"Mice. And rats. If that bothers you, I can call them 'cows' instead."