Piebald rookie question

I have a little normal 1.0 that has some small orange and white places on his stomach near his cloacae. I'm wondering if this might mean he is possibly het. Pied. If I bred him with an het. Pied. and he is it should produce pied babies right.http://img.tapatalk.com/d/12/11/12/gedazata.jpg

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If he is het pied, I'd breed him to a visual pied for the best odds of proving him out.

You could breed him to another het pied, but it could take years to hit a visual (If he is het pied).

Ringers don't always mean that it is het

I would pay for a het from a reputable breeder.

If you bought him as a normal, chances are he is a normal. Color and pattern can vary so much. Unless he has a parent that was a het or possible het I would just consider him a normal with a neat tail.

I'd either get the visual female to prove him out, or buy a pair of hets from a reputable breeder. Male hets are especially affordable. If you can afford to get a 100% het female from someone, you could purchase her, grow her up, and chances are the next year you could get a 100% het male (unrelated to boot!) to breed the following year after your female has gotten some size to her

The thing is that with piebalds being more common, that the hets are becoming relatively cheap. A 100% het pied male will run you as little as 100 bucks with some breeders, and actually I've seen them for much less. There is almost no market for 66% poss het pied males or 50% poss het pied males. Man of them get sold as normals to get rid of them and there are male het pieds out there that aren't being sold as such and he very well could be one of them and he very well could be not one of them.

If he's your beloved pet and you want to know if he's het or not, by all means try to prove him out. Or, if your goal is to produce pieds for sale, don't even try to prove him out--keep him as a pet.

Where hets are good, IMHO, is if you buy several, say four, 100% het pied girls and a visual pied male. If you breed pied to pied for the same money as it would cost to breed that male pied to four hets, every last one of the visual female's clutch will be visual, but with the het girls cranking out four clutches you get twice as many visual babies from your het group as the pied female will produce for you, and all for a few dozen extra rats and some cage cleaning.

So, first off: male het pieds, even proven ones, aren't intrinsically worth that much. So even if he proves, you still basically have a pet animal.

Second: Female pieds are worth a LOT. So don't buy one unless you really really want one. If he really is a normal, you'll end spending a lot of money, and all you'll get is a bunch 100% gets to show for it. And then you'll get crazy ideas like, "What if I had an albino, could I go for albino pieds? What if I had a pastel AND an albino? Hmmm...." And then you'll wake up one morning with 40 snakes and 15 breeding projects.

But if you just want to prove him out, a het isn't such a bad way to go. The odds are 1 in 4 per egg for het to het. Yeah, you could miss that two years in a row. But that's how I made my lavender albino, with a het to het breeding. If a het girl lays 4 or 5 eggs, you've got something like a 70% chance of hitting the visual. That's better than even odds.

With a pied female, the odds are 1 in 2 per eggs. Excellent odds. But the het to het breedings really aren't so bad.

What would I do? Well, I own 4 pieds, so OBVIOUSLY I would buy a pied because I wanted one anyway. Ahem. :rolleyes:

Thank you for the posts folks. I bought this snake on the Ben Seigel auction site as a normal possible ringer. It was my first snake since I was a kid. Since then I have expanded my collection to include 1.1 pastels and 1.2 normals and.1 het blurr from Tim Lane which is just a cull he threw in when I got my pastel female from him she is an unusual looking ball that was a project snake he was dinkering with. The reason I was asking about the het pied stuff is because I would like to have a pied and will eventually buy one but they are very expensive, around 1000.00 from what I've seen and was thinking if I could get a het pied female for about 100 and breed to my male in a couple of years I could have a pied or two maybe for a lot less. Tight was reasoning

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Originally Posted by Bobbafett

If he is het pied, I'd breed him to a visual pied for the best odds of proving him out.

You could breed him to another het pied, but it could take years to hit a visual (If he is het pied).

Ringers don't always mean that it is het

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why would you waste a visual pied female at breeding size on a het or possible het pied? and 100% het pied males are very cheap. If someone got a 100% het female from me, I would give them the het male.

There are a lot of normals out there with "ringers" it doesn't mean they are het piedbalds though.