Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I produced the most amazing pastel? the other day and I am looking for opinions please. As you can see from the photo the animal on the left is very different. It does have the washed out head of a super but seems to be REALLY bright yellow. It is sitting next to pastel littermates in the pics. I have bred my breeder pastel male to other normal females with typical results but this is the first time the dam as produced for me so perhaps she is 'different'? This clutch had 7 egg with all but 2 going bad. The two produced were the ones you see here, pastel and whatever this one is? Please let me know your thoughts and opinions...

That is wicked cool does kinda look like a super! Possibly it's due to egg stress? How did you loose the rest of the eggs? one way to find out - Breed it!!! BTW - what does the mom look like?
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Tosha

"Nihil facimus sed id bene facimus"

7.33.0 Ball Python (Harry and Fluffy and gang)
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0.0.2 frogs rescued from pool skimmer

Thanks for the comments. As for egg stress not thinking that was the case as the eggs cooked nice and steady in the same incubator as the rest of the seasons and the sibling looks like a typical pastel. The other eggs went bad fairly soon after being laid, as for why? Who knows.. Mom looks like a really nice, clean normal.

...is the one so much smaller than the other? Was it a small hatchling, not take in all its yolk? I had a Pastel premee last year, also looked kinda super-like, that DNS (did not survive). It came out of a partially-slugged egg, maybe 30-35% slugged. With all the other eggs going bad except 2, maybe the egg that produced this baby resulted in some delayed development. Late in embryogenesis this can be manifested as pale coloration. Just a thought. Good luck with it.

Scott J. Michaels DVM
Serpent City

I took so many photos of this animal that when I uploaded these today I didn't notice that they are two different set's of pictures. The top one being from the first shots I took with a different pastel as the sib wasn't out of the egg yet. The second shot is next to the sib and as you can see they are about the same size.

Beautiful pastel. Since, all of the possible senarios that others have come up with don't seem to line up (egg stress is still a possibility)...why don't you show us a pic of the sire and dam.
That may help to clear this up.

That being said, it is also true that "normals" are highly variable as far as color and patterning. A pastel is mostly a color morph and it could be that everything was stacked just right (genetically) for you to end up with a very light, cleanly patterned animal...the fact that the pastel gene was in there also was just a bonus.

Just an idea.

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