morph markings?

Newsflash: If you did not purchase that snake as a het, then 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999% chance it ISN'T. I'm not trying to burst your bubble here, but come on, for a "used to be a breeder" friend to say your snake has het markers but can't tell you why or how or for what trait, it sounds like he's just yanking your chain. "Het markers" are not a 100% reliable way to determine whether or not a snake is in fact het for anything, especially on a snake purchased as a normal.

And that's the nitty gritty, folks.

K

I would agree that the chances of a ball purchased as a normal being a het are long. However, the odds might be a little less long than all those 9's.

I've heard of more than one case of pet store females turning out to be het albino. There was even a case of someone breeding a het clown male to a presumed normal female and producing a piebald but I don't know what was up with that. As more known gene carrying males are bred to presumed normal females we should find more such cases. Also, as more captive bred females become available some may be found to be long shot possible hets that where just not tracked.

If hets for a recessive morph where randomly distributed at a 1 in 100 rate in the wild then the chances of a random pairing of two hets would be 1 in 10,000. With the 1 in 4 shot at homozygous babies that would result in 1 in 40,000 random wild bred babies being that morph. With 150,000 balls being harvested from the wild each year (that number is pretty old and might not be accurate any more) that would result in about 3 or 4 visible morphs from the wild each year for a morph with randomly distributed hets at 1 in 100. There are probably a few morphs where about this many are found each year. The big question is if the distribution is random or if localized inbreeding causes the production of visible morphs with much lower het rates.

It MIGHT turn out that your average "normal" has maybe a 1 in 200 chance of being het piebald, a 1 in 100 chance of being het albino, and maybe a 1 in 50 chance of being het ghost if these genes are randomly distributed over a large part of the wild range. These random het rates would result in about 1 wild bred piebald a year, 3 or 4 albinos, and about 60 ghosts out of 150,000 harvested eggs.

Now if there is a reliable marker to increase your chances further you could pick your one het out of the hundreds or thousands of imports you might manage to get access to during the import season (Aprilish).

The apparent piebald marker is a white belly (all three belly scales across, not just the middle biggest scale) with solid connected black lines along the edge, particularly in the last 3rd of the snake. Lots of for sure het piebalds don't have this but it shows up so often in the piebald lines that I believe it is a sporadic marker that shows up in some hets. Some presumed non hets (not from pied lines) have something like it but generally the black is down on the belly some and not pushed out far enough to leave all three belly scales wide white. The look-alikes also tend to have more broken and less straight stripes.

I wouldn't spend much if any extra for a presumed normal with these markings given that it is of course no where near a 100% chance het but if the one you already have happens to have good markings you might try to arrange to breed her to a pied line male just in case (if it's a girl). Just on average she might have a 1 in 200 chance of being a het (i.e. only a 99.5% chance of being normal) and if there is anything to the marker at all you might have a considerably better chance than that. If it's a boy you would probably be better off buying a known 100% het pied male to breed if you are serious about trying to eventually produce piebalds.