Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Just curious what do you all think a hatchling striped-abberrant-amelanistic ruthveni should be worth?

I'll say $1,500.

Agree? Disagree? More? Less?
-----
www.hcu-tx.org/

Whatever you can get John to pay for it!

But seriously....... I think that new morphs are overpriced for the most part and if you are willing to wait a few years the prices for them drop dramatically. You may be able to get $1500, but I think you would be fortunate to get anything over half of that.

>>Whatever you can get John to pay for it!
>>
>>But seriously....... I think that new morphs are overpriced for the most part and if you are willing to wait a few years the prices for them drop dramatically. You may be able to get $1500, but I think you would be fortunate to get anything over half of that.

LMAO!!!!!!!
-----
John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...
www.coastalbendcaptivebreeding.com

>>Whatever you can get John to pay for it!
>>
>>But seriously....... I think that new morphs are overpriced for the most part and if you are willing to wait a few years the prices for them drop dramatically. You may be able to get $1500, but I think you would be fortunate to get anything over half of that.

The only problem with that reasoning is these aren't the run of the mill single recessive morphs.....They are unpredictable and are not easy to produce.......It may take many breeding attempts to produce another.......
Just my two cents.....
-----
John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...
www.coastalbendcaptivebreeding.com

>>You may be able to get $1500, but I think you would be fortunate to get anything over half of that.

I agree with Greg, except half is still 5x too much for me.

Who is going to pay that when they can't be reproduced with any certainty? So that reason _for_ is also a reason _against_ the inflated cost in some eyes.

I think for sure you would sell a couple at that cost, because there is a sucker born every minute. But how many could you sell?

>>Who is going to pay that when they can't be reproduced with any certainty? So that reason _for_ is also a reason _against_ the inflated cost in some eyes.

Never thought of it that way.......LOL
-----
John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...
www.coastalbendcaptivebreeding.com

>>Just curious what do you all think a hatchling striped-abberrant-amelanistic ruthveni should be worth?
>>
>>I'll say $1,500.
>>
>>Agree? Disagree? More? Less?

As a hatchling I'd agree.....Older=More....
And you didn't get the one I wanted did you?.....LOL
-----
John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...
www.coastalbendcaptivebreeding.com

Thanks for the responses!

FYI I am not selling any nor do I have any of these. A friend of mine just produced some and he asked me what I thought they were worth. He did get some of his breeding stock from me though so I was happy to see the project prove out for him. Several years ago he got some 100% het amel 50% pos het striped abberrant hatchlings from me and some other hets from Shannon.

I agree with what Joe said about the difficulty in producing them, ie the unpredictable nature of the striped abberrant trait, being a double edged sword. Hard to produce = rare = expensive but it also means fewer people will be interested in shelling out big bucks to maybe or maybe not get the results they are looking for.

My friend is more interested in genetics than in selling/marketing/making money though so I think the main reward for him was simply in reproducing and hopefully learning about something that was not fully understood.

Now that visual(aka homozygous) combos have been produced I do not think these will be as hard to reproduce as people might be thinking. I think there were actually two problems, 1) the poor fertility that male amel ruthven's are reported to have and 2) the unpredictable nature of the striped abberrant gene.

I don't think the striped abberrant trait is as hard to produce as alot of people think. I think what it is is that alot of people expected them to be simple recessive and when they found them not acting that way they got discouraged and gave up. It's also highly variable in expression; the trait can be exressed quite dramatically, as in fully striped, or it can be as subtle as just having a few broken bands. I suspect that alot of striped abberrants were actually produced but they were not recognized as such because they just looked like normals with a few broken bands and/or a few crossovers. I suspect that many striped abberrant ruthveni with more subtle expression were simply not recognized and got sold off as normals. I think if people had kept entire clutches and bred them back this would have been figured out alot sooner. Now that this is known I think the main problem will be dealing with and fixing the low fertility of amel males.

I think this is an awesome morph and awesome species and I hope people get into it. It may be a good thing if prices drop quickly because then more people might be able to work with them. I would hate to see such a great Mexican species go by the wayside and end up just getting hybridized out of existence, which seems to be the path many bloodlines have taken already.
-----
www.hcu-tx.org/

>>Now that visual(aka homozygous) combos have been produced I do not think these will be as hard to reproduce as people might be thinking. I think there were actually two problems, 1) the poor fertility that male amel ruthven's are reported to have and 2) the unpredictable nature of the striped abberrant gene.

We still need to see an amel Super Striped Ruthveni.........
-----
John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...
www.coastalbendcaptivebreeding.com

I'm not sure but the ones my friend just produced might be super striped abberrant amels. Both parents were striped abberrants het for amel. If a striped abberrant equates to a het and a super equates to a homo then 25% of the clutch should be normals, 25% should be striped abberrant and 50% should be super striped abberrants. In the amel part of the equation of course 25% would be normals, 25% hets and 50% amels.

He got 5 hatchlings. 3 were striped abberrant with normal color and 2 were striped abberrant amels.* I don't know if it's possible to tell just by looking which ones are supers but some of them should be by odds. The normal colored ones do look more like they would be the supers but the amels are pretty dramatic in their striping and abberrancies too.

You can send me you email address with ks' pm function and I will send you pictures of both the parents and the hatchlings if you want.

* Interesting that 100% of the clutch displayed some level of striping and abberrancy when het to het should yield 25/25/50. Perhaps one of the parents was actually a super? You should examine the pics because you can see that a low grade super might be very hard to distinguish from a high grade simple striped abberrant(aka het). That's actually a theory of mine that might fit with alot of things, ie melanistic thayeri, striped abberrant ruthveni and blackbelly hypermelanistic Cal kings. The theory being that low grade "supers" can be virtually indistinguishable from high grade "hets" and low grade "hets" may be virtually indistinguishable from some normals.
-----
www.hcu-tx.org/

Aaron,
If you are talking about a guy by the name of Mark those are two male amel stripes (not super) and 3 female stripes (not super).

The distinguishable difference between a striped and a super stripe is the open, clean ground color on the dorsum, bordered by black on a super. The aberrant stripes show some ground color through the red, but no black border is present.

The super striped ruthveni is even harder to produce and the percentages you suggested above would only work for the amel gene that is a simple recessive trait.....
-----
John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...
www.coastalbendcaptivebreeding.com

Has the exact mode of inheritance been discovered for the striped abberrant trait?

I am thinking it works the same as a simple recessive gene except the hets are actually visual. That is the way several pattern mutations work in boids, I believe, and I think they call it co-dominant or dominante, I not really sure. So I am thinking a striped abberrant ruthveni would function like a heterozygous does and a super striped abberrant would function the same way as a homozygous.

For example:

Striped abberrant x normal = 50% striped abberrant 50% normal.

Striped abberrant x striped abberrant = 25% normal, 50% striped abberrant and 25% super striped abberrant.

Super striped abberrant x normal = 100% striped abberrant.

Super striped abberrant x striped abberrant = 50% super striped abberrant and 50% striped abberrant.

Do you know if that's the way this trait works?

If that's the way it works I can imagine these are the problems that could occur: A normal ruthveni with a few broken bands can easily be confused with a low grade striped abberrant and vice versa. A low grade super striped abberrant could easily be confused with a high grade striped abberrant. I'm sure sometimes it's obvious but on an individual basis I don't know if enough have been produced for anyone to say for sure that a super always looks this way or that way. Misinterpretation of these visual appearances could easily cause problems when people are pairing up adults and when they are trying to count the results from clutches. It's taken me so long to type this that I can't remember what your description of super was, lol. I am going to have to go back and re-read it after I post this,lol.

The original "het" that started this trait, that I owned for a time and has changed hands many times and which I think you may own now, was not even discernable from a normal. The only difference it had was it had a white snout, the rest of the snake was totally typical. I think that may have caused some confusion in the beginning because it made it seems like this was a simple recessive trait. That snake is my basis for saying these things may not always look the way we think they should.

I'm definately not claiming to have this figured out. At best I'm just hoping to present some theories and maybe give people some things to watch out for when trying to determine what's what. I also appreciate all your comments.
-----
www.hcu-tx.org/

>>Has the exact mode of inheritance been discovered for the striped abberrant trait?

I don't think it has been figured out Aaron. Shannon knows more about it than I do. I do know that Justin never figured it out. He kept claiming that 1 out of 16 of his offspring would be amel super stripe and he never produced one. He also claimed the striped gene was recessive like the amel gene but it never worked that way.

>>I am thinking it works the same as a simple recessive gene except the hets are actually visual. That is the way several pattern mutations work in boids, I believe, and I think they call it co-dominant or dominante, I not really sure. So I am thinking a striped abberrant ruthveni would function like a heterozygous does and a super striped abberrant would function the same way as a homozygous.
>>
>>For example:
>>
>>Striped abberrant x normal = 50% striped abberrant 50% normal.

Maybe, but the Striped aberrants may just show a slight degree of aberrancy....

>>Striped abberrant x striped abberrant = 25% normal, 50% striped abberrant and 25% super striped abberrant.

I wish I had some more to experiment with. I do have a striped aberrant male and a "het" female with one tiny stripe in her pattern that I am going to try next year....

This has not been proven to be true. I think Ryan Hoyer stated that he produced a super stripe with this type of pairing and that is how Justin produced his super stripes, but I don't think the percentage all worked out like they would with recessive genes.....
>>Super striped abberrant x normal = 100% striped abberrant.

Again...Maybe but some of the aberrant stripes are just slightly aberrant and not striped.....I bet the gene can be further line bred to produce these odds though.....
Many people confuse a line bred trait with a co dominant or dominant trait. Take a line bred trait and refine it. Then breed the refined look to a normal and you will be going backwards and get an inbetweener slightly showing the trait you desire.....

>>Super striped abberrant x striped abberrant = 50% super striped abberrant and 50% striped abberrant.

If anyone could ever get their hands on the Super Stripes and get them to breed successfully then maybe we would know if a Super X Super would produce all Supers, but Justin tried, Justin's cousin tried and Nathan tried with no luck at all...as far as I know....

>>Do you know if that's the way this trait works?

>>If that's the way it works I can imagine these are the problems that could occur: A normal ruthveni with a few broken bands can easily be confused with a low grade striped abberrant and vice versa. A low grade super striped abberrant could easily be confused with a high grade striped abberrant. I'm sure sometimes it's obvious but on an individual basis I don't know if enough have been produced for anyone to say for sure that a super always looks this way or that way. Misinterpretation of these visual appearances could easily cause problems when people are pairing up adults and when they are trying to count the results from clutches. It's taken me so long to type this that I can't remember what your description of super was, lol. I am going to have to go back and re-read it after I post this,lol.

You may be correct, but the few "supers" I have seen have ground color on their dorsum that is bordered by black....I can see it being hard to discern and amel super, but the one pic I sent you via email is the closest I've seen and I still don't think it's an amel super.....I could certainly be wrong though......

>>The original "het" that started this trait, that I owned for a time and has changed hands many times and which I think you may own now, was not even discernable from a normal. The only difference it had was it had a white snout, the rest of the snake was totally typical. I think that may have caused some confusion in the beginning because it made it seems like this was a simple recessive trait. That snake is my basis for saying these things may not always look the way we think they should.

I have him here but I do not own him...He is still Shannon's. I have him cooling and may pair him up with my normal het for nothing female, but I dunno.....He's 30 now and has cataracts in both eyes, but he LOVES to eat.....LOL

>>I'm definately not claiming to have this figured out. At best I'm just hoping to present some theories and maybe give people some things to watch out for when trying to determine what's what. I also appreciate all your comments.

I haven't either and don't claim to either....LOL
I will have to start proving it out with my striped male and "het" female.....Jimmy T. got all of Ryan's and we stay in contact. Maybe he'll produce some supers and amel stripes this year....maybe even a super striped amel......We'll see....

I wish it were that simple....
But if you bred a Stripe to a Stripe you are not guaranteed super stripes....not even 25% chance.
-----
John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...
www.coastalbendcaptivebreeding.com

And....these are just names WE give them.....
I don't think anyone knows what is really going on with them just yet.

Maybe an aberrant is a "grade B" stripe.....Maybe a super stripe is just a cleaner phenotypic expression and not another morph....or super form.......Maybe there is a wide range of the same morph....from a slight aberrancy to two perfectly bordered stripes on each side of the dorsum.......
-----
John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...
www.coastalbendcaptivebreeding.com

Whatever it is it's pretty cool. Please post when you get offspring. I'm looking forward to that.
-----
www.hcu-tx.org/

>>Whatever it is it's pretty cool. Please post when you get offspring. I'm looking forward to that.

I agree Aaron.....It is cool.
I like rarities....especially when they can be traced back to a wild caught specimen that is still with us.....
I have my fingers crossed that we get something cool next year.
If not, we will try until we do....LOL

Jimmy T. should get something nice with those Ruthies he picked up from Ryan......I am rather anxious for him too.......
-----
John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...
www.coastalbendcaptivebreeding.com