Proving a Poss Het...

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Originally Posted by Pythonfriend

i mean, we are not talking about tri-stripe, atomic or sunglow here, just pied.

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LOL actually I was talking about any recessive, just using pied as an example for the numbers game. And the question is academic for me, I don't have any poss hets. I've just read the discussions about proving them out and wondered if there was a standard number of eggs or clutches that people used before saying yeah or nay.

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Originally Posted by Pythonfriend

my answer would be: 4.

if it really is a 100% het pied, your chance to miss out on one egg is 50%, for two eggs its 25%, for 3 eggs its 12,5%, and after 4 eggs, at 6,25%, i would write it off.

i mean if its lets say a lesser enchi possible het pied female and you want to breed lesser and enchi into pied you might still repeat the breeding to hit your lesser enchi 100% het pied. So there may be a good reason to continue.

if there isnt one, or if its really just a possible het pied female without other genes, i would stop after 4 eggs.

Also some people can make out het pied markers in possible het pieds and pick the ones that are most likely to be the real het pieds, which already casts more doubt on possible hets than would be the case with, lets say, albino.

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Your answer of 4 is purely based on mathematical logic sadly if you ever had bred ball pythons you would know that breeding is hardly about math and is hardly textbook.

Yes we all know the mathematical possible outcomes of a clutch, however when breeding there is such a thing as missing odds and sometimes the opposite is true too.

To the OP

Depending on the number of eggs in each of your clutches I would give it 2 to 3 seasons.

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Originally Posted by bcr229

I've just read the discussions about proving them out and wondered if there was a standard number of eggs or clutches that people used before saying yeah or nay.

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7 eggs is what I use. At that point, there is one chance in a hundred that the snake is a het. Pretty good odds. See Pythonfriend's post (#20) in this thread.

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Originally Posted by MarkS

That's real advice. I've had possible hets that haven't proven out until their 4th clutch. By that time you should have a female from an earlier clutch old enough to breed back to her father. Yes, according to the 'odds' you should know in the 1st clutch, unfortunatly snakes aren't very good at math. Besides, what else are you going to breed her too?

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Is there no danger in snake in-breeding?

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Originally Posted by Recreation

Is there no danger in snake in-breeding?

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I know it's nothing nearly as bad as say dogs inbreeding or humans inbreeding. Snakes seem to be tens of times more resistant to ill effects of it.
Just for me personally, I would not inbreed unless there is a reason for it. The reasons I would do it is if trying to prove out something genetic or along those lines. But for a morph such as pied....it's no longer necessary. Hets are very affordable and plentiful.

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Originally Posted by Recreation

Is there no danger in snake in-breeding?

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Not really no. Theoretically it's possibly to uncover more undesirable genes but I've never found it to be a problem. Most of the mutations we like so much would be impossible without inbreeding

the thing about mathematical logic is.... it works.


you start with a 50% possible het, get 4 eggs, all 4 are misses. Now its no longer a 50% possible het, its a 6,25% possible het.


When faced with a 6,25% possible het piebald, would you breed a piebald to it? Would you pay more for a 6,25% possible het than you would for a normal female?

I wouldnt want to produce another clutch with a 93.75% chance for total disappointment and only het hatchlings. I would, already at this early point, breed something like a lemonblast male to it, for a clutch with a high chance of getting good stuff, and raise one of the four 100% het pied hatchlings.

of course you can go up to 7 eggs or 10 eggs. But i would strongly recommend against producing 2 or 3 clutches.... after 2 clutches you will likely be above 10 eggs, and then there is only a 1 in 1000 chance left that its a het after all. A third clutch would really be a waste, you would be better off using some multi-gene codominant male for the third clutch.

There is not much to be gained from turning a 0,1% possible het into a 0,001% possible het, and in 999 out of 1000 cases thats all you will get if you already got 10 misses, but continue anyway.


Yes maybe 4 is too early, i would lose patience, others have more patience. But after 10 eggs its pretty much over.

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Originally Posted by MarkS

Not really no. Theoretically it's possibly to uncover more undesirable genes but I've never found it to be a problem. Most of the mutations we like so much would be impossible without inbreeding

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So if i bred a pair of bp's i could breed one offspring back to the parent safely ?

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Originally Posted by Recreation

So if i bred a pair of bp's i could breed one offspring back to the parent safely ?

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Sure, why not? Personally I wouldn't do it without a specific goal in mind, but I've done it many times in the past when I've wanted to see if I could reproduce some quality of one of the parents that I liked and wanted to add to my breeding stock

Murphy likes to mess with me. Admittedly, I breed corn snakes (I'm in this forum because BP genetics fascinate me!), but the odds games of het to visual are the same no matter what the species.

Last year I bred my charcoal to a butter (amel + caramel) to test him for amel. I got 18 eggs in the first clutch, with a fairly even mix of normals and amels, proving the het.

Then I got a single fertile egg out of the butter's second clutch for the year. That egg hatched out a butter. So, 19 eggs and one offspring caramel based when bred to an animal homozygous for caramel. Talk about low odds!