The fast way or the slow way in breeding your stock.

If you had the means to purchase your starting stock in the homogeneous state would you ? Or go the slower route and purchase the normal balls and start from there.....your thoughts

I would start by buying the best quality animals, aka the best examples of each morph that I could find. Because, het or not, the better quality your founding stock, the better quality all of your hatchlings will have.

And if you always breed for quality, you'll never be short of people wanting to buy your hatchlings.

If you want a morph, and you have the money, I'd defintiely go with the visual form. If you wanted to breed co-dom morphs like pastels, I'd get a super pastel(homozygous form of pastel) and ensure getting pastels, for instance.

But if you want morphs, breeding normals won't get you there. You'd need at least carriers of whatever genes you want to end up with.

I think if I were starting out with some cash, I'd get some homozygous morphs, and perhaps some cool dinkers. Also, trying to get animals that are newer(rather than common morphs like pastels or spiders)so you aren't going to produce the 'same thing' that so many others would have.

Thank you- most of your base morphs start out with a pastel or spider then progress to a co dom. right?

If I'm not mistaken co doms are base morphs, anything that isn't designer aka 2 base morphs together. So pastel and spider are base morphs but pastel is a co-dom and spider is a dominant. With ball pythons it isn't just basic dominant and recessive morphs, co-dom's, like mojaves and pastels, are also base morphs. Designer morphs would be like bumble bees or super pastels.

What I've seen recommended is to either buy a couple single gene or normal females and then after a year buy a couple two gene males. Thats my plan anyway. I got a mojave male earlier this year to make sure I was up to keeping ball pythons and so far I love him. I'm starting to save up now and hopefully next summer I'll have the money for a lesser female and a ghost female. After that i'll get one more male, I really like the axanthic morph and the bee's but everyone makes bee's.

http://www.worldofballpythons.com/morphs/ is a great resource for looking up morphs and if you plan on breeding to see what morphs you need to make the snakes you want.

Good Luck!

http://www.ballpython.ca/genetics.html