I think we can all argue in circles about wether or not you can breed the hybrid out of a snake. The purists will tell you no, there will always be some small amount of foreign DNA and they are right. And the rest will say how would you ever know, you probobly have some hybrids in your "pure" collection right now! After all only a sharp eye would have caught something unusual about that "normal" cal king and it 25% cambelli!!

WHATEVER! everyone knows the facts about this situation and its just personal preference whether any hybridization bothers you or not. We should all just try to be as honest as possible and that the most anyone can ask for.

I just wanted to coment on the traits being allelic across similar species...

Since melanin (just using albino as an example) is the same protein with the same molecular structure in all reptiles that I know of, this means that it has the same DNA sequence in all species. This means that an extremely early ancestor of modern reptiles developed this pigment and through speciation it has spead across many organisms.

It used to be that the definition of a species was animals that were capable of interbreeding with each other. Now we know that this is not true and our definition of what makes up a species has had to become somewhat more flexible. Since all colubrids are very closely related species and all lampropeltis are even closer, it makes perfect sense that mutated traits in highly conserved DNA sequences would be allelic across species. IE moving a functional gene to a different spot on a chromosome is not something that happens easily so the same genes will reside on the different species in the same place on the same chromosomes etc.

In fact it would not surprise me if certain specific traits were allelic across drastically differnt species. It may not be possible to breed an albino boa with an albino kinsnake to find out for other obvious reasons but I bet that the location and structure of the melanin genes are similar across most snake species.

cheers

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