Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Can someone explain why co-dom prices drop so fast, I understand supply and demand dictates value most of the time.

What is the big picture when someone wants to invest BUT is turned off by the drop in value every month?

Thanks

Brian A.

There are a couple reasons in my opinion.

One of them is that co doms are the easiest to produce because you only need 1 co dom to make more. So all the people that want to make a quik buck buy a male breed it the next year and sell them below price value. But people that are in it to the long run usually like making supers
With a simple reccecive it is a bit harder to produce more homozygous snakes. It could take 2 years to hit the gene with 2 100% hets. In my opinion the best way to go is pairing a het with a homo to get more homos and 66% hets.

Just my 2 cents many people might disagree.

"In my opinion the best way to go is pairing a het with a homo to get more homos and 66% hets."

Try again... you'd get homos and 100% hets.

Homozygous X Heterozygous = Homozygous and 100% Heterozygous.
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Adrian
AFR
http://imageevent.com/afreptiles

Okay okay i made a simple mistake.

With co-dominant mutations you can produce visible mutants much much faster.

With a recessive project your visible mutant production is limited by how many adult at least het females you have. Sure you could produce hets but if you are a no-name those might be hard to sell. Say you want to start a piebald project. You either buy (expensive) or make your own het females to go with a het or homozygous pied male. Either way you have to wait years and years for the het females to grow up and produce at most 50% piebalds.

With a co-dominant project you can use already grown normal females to produce visible morphs the first year. You may already have more normal adult females than you could buy hatchling het females. If you have say even just four girls that will produce 6 eggs each and know how to breed them you could buy a single male mojave and possibly produce a dozen mojave's next year. Of course you might not get lucky with all of them so best to not count on all of them going but maybe you had 6 or 8 to start with.

So, if you want to take your time and hate to see prices drop much (they will almost always drop at least some) then go with recessive. Still in the 3 years it takes to grow the het females up they might have lost as much as 1 year of co-dominant depreciation.

If you have adult females and confidence that you can get them bred and don't mind working with and selling more animals at decreasing prices then go co-dominant. So what if mojave's are $500 next year (I don't think they will be), if you produce and sell 12 of them that's $6,000 more than you will make while your het pied females get a year closer to first producing.

Pastels and pieds were first produced around the same time. Pastels sell for more then het pieds and super pastels sell for more then pieds. Everyone only talks about the het forms. Sure co-doms seem to drop fast but what is a super mojave or cinnamon worth, still quite a bit. Now I'm in no way saying co-doms are better then reccesive or vice versa, I try and keep an even mix of the two.

Eric
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www.ESReptiles.com

That is a very interesting point. The comparison is usually between Pastels (heterozygous) and Piebalds (homozygous). Apples and oranges. The comparison you described shows the various codominant morphs in a new light.

Thank you for sharing.

Chris
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mean people suck

Why didn't I think of that? LOL

Two similar and linked reasons for the difference in price between the Co-Doms and Recessives:

1a. Risk of Dishonest breeders. How do we know that the 100%, 66%, or 50% het pied is really what the breeder says it is? There is a financial risk in that purchase which is inherent in the relatively lower price. You don't have that risk in the Co-Doms which can be easily identified.

1b. The Super Form eliminates all such possiblities of normal offspring. The worst I can do with a Super to Homozygote/Normal is a Homozygote so the pricing of the Super is much higher because you have no risk of a genetically "worthless" offspring. Albeit, you don't truly have that risk with Homozygote to Het pairings of the simple recessive, you still have the dishonesty risk you can't see the trait in the het.

Brian