First off let me state that I am NOT interested in breeding ball pythons anytime soon. I don't even have my first ball python yet. Mostly I've been doing some research and my curiosity has been piqued on breeding.

I've been wondering how much inbreeding goes on with all these BP breeders trying to produce color morphs and mutations. I can see how this might be especially prominent with recessive traits. If you got your hands on one 100% het albino male, the cheapest route to producing an actual albino animal would be to mate the 100% het albino male with a normal female, and then inbreed the male with any female offspring in the hopes that one was also het albino.(did I make that clear? kind of wordy)

I assume that ball pythons are every bit as susceptible to inbreeding problems as just about any other complex creature on this planet. Is breeding BPs fairly sell self-regulated by the breeders to prevent inbreeding? I could see how it would be not uncommon to get two BPs from seperate locales(say, two yellow bellies with the intention of producing ivories), and have it turn out that they are brother and sister or first cousins or some other relation that would lead to possible inbreeding problems.

Or is this not really an issue, and there are enough wild caught or captive hatched BPs introduced that there is plenty of genetic diversity? I've been reading about BPs as much as I can a couple hours a day for the past few days, and never once have I even come across the word "inbreeding".