Just a few years ago leucistic ball pythons where just a rumor. There where no public pictures of a living leucistic ball python. There was a rumor that a young male was imported and quickly sold to a collector in Japan. It was a very upsetting rumor because not only did the supposed collector not want any pictures of the snake released he (per the rumor) had no intention of breeding the snake. Supposedly he wanted the ONLY white ball python. I don't know if this rumor was even true but fortunately more sources of the leucistic gene where found.



The high initial price of new morphs tends to insure that they get in the hands of the most experienced breeders with the resources to reproduce them as fast as possible rather than ending up as collector items or worse, dead like many of the cheap imported normals bought by kids as their first reptile.



It takes a lot of work to start with a single attractive new imported morph ball python and reproduce it enough to make it generally available even to breeders much less pet keepers. The capitalistic system is very efficient at meeting demand. The high initial price is the fuel that runs the ball python industry machine to do the decades of work needed to produce enough morph babies to get them down to pet store prices. If no one would have paid more than $500 for the first albino ball pythons then it's very unlikely that the many breeders who have worked hard for years thinking of better ways to increase their albino project production would have bothered. The only reason there are as many albino ball pythons around as there are now is because of the high initial price and it will still take years of work to produce enough to go around at an even more affordable price.

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