ASF markings ?

I have over 100 asf babies and this is the first one with makings from the nose to the ears. Is this normal ? Could it be genetic ? Should I hold it back ? Sorry for the lousy pictures.
http://www.ball-pythons.net/gallery/...9/p1020199.jpg
http://www.ball-pythons.net/gallery/...9/p1020203.jpg

Guess I'm missing the specialness of it?

It probably isnt special .I am new to asf and had only over 100 babies. This is the first one with markings from the nose to ears. All the others had clean white faces.Just wanted to ask around , other more experienced people what they thought.

Ooh, I suppose I misread which markings you meant. ;) Can't say I haven't seen it, however I havent looked to reproduce it either.

gremlins sometimes have fat white stripes on forehead... sometimes skinny. Sometimes cheeks are white, sometimes colored. The pics are a normal variation for a gremlin.

I've got some from my homozygous pied colony like that. Mine tend to be a lower white pied compared to some I saw from another colony but I get a few of the ones with lots of white too. I've only just set up my first cross colony group to produce the heterozygous pieds so I don't have personal experience with how they look but it's sounding like there might be some overlap between the highest white hets (gremlins) and the lowest white homozygous pieds with this co-dominant mutation. Sort of like how ever once in a while someone has to ask if a baby from a pastel X pastel ball python breeding is a super pastel or not.

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Originally Posted by Mike Cavanaugh

gremlins sometimes have fat white stripes on forehead... sometimes skinny. Sometimes cheeks are white, sometimes colored. The pics are a normal variation for a gremlin.

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Mike, I coulda sworn you considered gremlins the head striped ones (I call head spotted), and not the white headed and white butt ones (I call em pieds) like in the picture. :confused:

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Originally Posted by littleindiangirl

Mike, I coulda sworn you considered gremlins the head striped ones (I call head spotted), and not the white headed and white butt ones (I call em pieds) like in the picture. :confused:

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the gremlins are the ones with the stripes on their forehead(what you call head spotted). they can be skinny stripes, and also fat stripes like the ones in the pictures. My pied ASF's sometimes have colored ears, but they don't have any color on the face most of the time.

In other words, I am assuming the ASF's pictured (especially the second picture) is not a pied, but a head spotted with a fat white strip) but it could also be a pied with more color then usual on the face? Don't know. I have about 10 in my grow up tub that look exactly like the ones pictured. can't remember what parents they were pulled from....

We have a lot of young born with those markings. We refer to them as 'Badgers'.
Producing a couple of thousand young per year, we find all colours and markings being produced from self beige through to dark brown and all two colour variations in between. Head markings vary from solid colours to blazes, eye patches, eye stripes and 'half and half'.
After six years of breeding ASF's, nothing comes as a surprise now. The most recent anomolies are a litter of 3 week old 'dwarf' ASF's, half an inch long and smaller than week old mouse pinkies.
Eric Davies

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Originally Posted by Herpquest

The most recent anomolies are a litter of 3 week old 'dwarf' ASF's, half an inch long and smaller than week old mouse pinkies.
Eric Davies

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Sounds like you need some fresh blood lines!