It's no secret that humans love to tinker with the animals we domesticate. Just compare a pug to a wolf, and you'll see how extreme we can take it! Whether for function, form, or fancy, customizing pets seems to be pretty standard practice. However, most of our modification in most species came after years of selective breeding. Even when mutations did crop up (dwarfism, brachycephalism, albinism, etc.) we still took several generations to mold these traits into displaying the intensity we see in most or our modern domestic companions. I'm generalizing here, but for the most part dramatic mutations don't really seem to be all that common of am occurrence. Even a great deal of CB snakes and lizard morphs are polygenic, having been line bred to produce the clarity and consistency of color and form we see today.

The notable exception seems to be ball pythons. Even today, people comb over wild caught imports looking for that one reptile with unusual color or markings, hoping to add it to a new project and prove it out- that it will be a heritable mutation. So my question is: WHY? Why do ball pythons seem to display such a startling array of genetic variance out in the wild? How is it that in only a decade or two, we've found enough base morphs to create (according to WoBP's current numbers) OVER 3700 genetic combinations? What makes BPs so prone to seemingly spontaneous and prolific mutations, when compared to, say, a sheep, who generally will come in maybe four or five colors tops?