Quality of breeding stock

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Originally Posted by jinx667

I think the claim that we only line breed for looks is not accurate. Over time, breeders also refine things like clutch size.

This brings back the point made earlier about really looking at the Normals that you use in your projects. If you have Normal female that is a monster egg layer, it is not a bad idea to get her genetics into what you are working on. But, she still helps if she is a nice looking Normal, or at least carries visual traits that you are looking to integrate into your project.

But back to the bigger point. Fly by night breeders who are just putting together whatever animals are not looking to improve ANY of this. They are looking to make a quick buck and do not care if they are producing sub-par animals.


While discussing this topic over on the BLBC, a good point came up that some folks like the ones that may not be considered optimal examples. The example of using a browned out Pastel as a dark morph enhancer. I see the point here, and if someone wants to breed a line with a specific trait for a specific purpose, then bravo.

Once again, the folks I am complaining about are not thinking on this level. it is all about a quick $$$$$.

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I think a lot of the sub-par animals are also caused by people buying from local pet stores rather then from bigger and more reputable breeds or stores and then going home and thinking they can breed them. I know of breeders in my area that sell their seasons left overs to pet stores because they are lower quality and are unable to sell them to hobbyists because of it. Granted, I bought my first ball python from a pet store but I got lucky and she was from a breeder who had to get rid of his collection and the pet store had all paperwork and genetics for her.

Hi, my name is dave. I thought I should make my username my real name so there would be no way to hide when the townsfolk come out with the torches & gear at midnight looking for me. I saw a link to this thread posted by Pro Exotics on the facebook and thought, "Hey, it's almost as much drama as cornsnakes.com, but not quite". I'm a cornsnake guy. Don't have a BP yet, so I'm dissable. Got about 600 of the wriggly corns, and a fair grasp on the genetics vortex. Keep looking at these BPs out of the corner of my good eye at expos, online, all the familiar places. Some of them stop me in my tracks.

Reading through all this thread, there's a few words which leap off the page at me like a hungry chigger in a dry swamp. So I thought, "Hey, I'll get a username, and post some pot-stirring words of dumbdom". Please keep in mind I'm just learning new terms about things like "double hets" and "Killer Bees" and "Bloody Pangolins" and morph names. So some of the morph names might not be quite accurate, but hey, I'm learnable. And sometimes delusional. I hope I'll fit in here. Okay okay I'll get on with it.

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Originally Posted by jinx667

(I understand there are a handful of "ugly" snakes that throw great babies, these are not the rule)

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Cherry picked this single sentence out of the post which started this thread.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and wildly assume the little I know about genetics in one Genus of snakes can be applied to snakes of another Genus. There are probably not enough "ugly" snakes (Assuming you mean "classics" or "normal" or "non-homozygous for recessive traits/gene combos" when you refer to "ugly" snakes).

"Incromulents" are the morph-name I am using for this post. I suspect they do not exist yet in the trade. Hope springs eternal & all that stuff. Perhaps(?) "ugly" snakes are necessary for producing healthy morphs/?. I often see persons acquiring a 1.1, 1.2, etc, of future breeding stock from an individual producer, with no knowledge of if they are F1, F2, F5, F293... with the goal of breeding them together to produce more of the same morph. If one can acquire unrelated stock for breeding them to the first year they are ready to breed, and produce some "holdbacks", this is a good way of getting 50% unrelated blood/genetics into the breeding program. By "unrelated", I do not mean simply buying some Incromulents from another table at the expo, but asking lots of questions, to make sure the stock has been out-crossed and brought back through a couple of generations. There seems to be some kind of urgency to get back one's investment as fast as possible before there are ten thousand producers of Incromulents and the market crashes. So okay, you got a clutch of baby Incromulents and they all roll over on their backs when they swallow the FT meals, and that's cute to watch so it's a marketing advantage, and they're all chimney red and Halloween orange and they do some other jigglemaster tricks as well, but focusing on the color makes them better then the Incromulents on someone else's table at the expo. Plus, they're funner to watch. Heck, I'm ready to shell out 9K for one right now!

Running with scissors. Does anyone "Line Breed" BPs? This does not mean breeding babies to babies from an original 1.1 for several generations.
So you find the perfect high color/pattern/recessive-genetics-&/or-traits male, he is everything you want him to be.
Then you find three UNrelated females from three OTHER sources which are WHOLLY unrelated to each other, unrelated to the male.
(One could use 4 or more other females, depending on how far down the road you want to go with BPs into many years into the future. There are many variables to look at during this original nexus of making a decades long decision around the goals of one's breeding program; the three females may well be three different high color recessive genetics [genes or traits] morphs).
Breed the male to each of the three females.
Holdback ALL.
Label them! G1 = Giving the offspring of female#1 the designation of "G1". Do not discard the extra males, you never know if an "ugly" male is going to toss out awesome babies.
Group 1 (G1)
Group 2 (G2)
Group 3 (G3)

Keep the 3 groups separate. This is imperative.


Raise up G1 and breed F1 X F1; hold back targets.
Raise targets up, breed F2 X F, raise up, repeat: F3 X F3.


Do the above steps with G2 and G3.


Hitting F4 & F5:
G1, G2, and G3 are only 50% related, because they came from different mothers.
G1-F3 X G2-F3. = F4. Holdback, group. Repeat. F4 X F4 = F5.


F5 from G1 X G2. Breed these into G3. Has your cerebral cortex imploded yet?


By doing so, you are interlacing the genetics through several line-bred generations, so when you out-cross in F7 or F8 X a new wild-collected or otherwise un-related BP, genetics of the target are so thickly interlaced, that one should get back around 35-50% Target in the F2. So the Target, whether caused by a gene, set of genes, or genetics-- in this instance appears to behave like a gene, when in fact, there may be no specific gene causing the visual phenotype. Hence, Incromulents "appear to be a gene" but in fact they are simply a line-bred morph.

There are other ways to look at a lot of these high-color line-bred morphs, that is, that het genes can influence the visual color of a morph. Different het genes can change the visual appearance of an individual critter. Only by working with them for several generations will this become apparent.

Of course you'll get some odd stuff to leave at the local petshop along the way, and then forum people will call it "sub-standard" stuff. but to protect one's own personal vestment, sometimes it is necessary to leave some "ugly" snakes at the petshop, rather then listing them with all the hets, to try to get ten dollars more for them in the short-term.

Hope this wasn't a waste of otherwise good space. Special thanks to Pro Exotics. Man o man, I gotter git me some BPs.
Thanks for sharing.
Cheers, dp. it's like a dyslexic bp, dp is.

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Originally Posted by dave partington

Has your cerebral cortex imploded yet?

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rather exploded. it's all over the floor. now i have to go get the mop.

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Originally Posted by satomi325

There are 2 sort of reasons why to breed animals. They're based on conformation or performance. Usually breeding for performance are working lines of animals. For example, race horses or dogs who herd.

But if you look at show animals. Any show animal(live stock, dogs, cats, rats, ferrets, etc etc) its based on body and look.

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I'm involved in dog breeding and this division you are talking about is the cause of many many many problems we see in pedigree "show" dogs. Sure, most show-line breeders will tell you that they breed for looks and general health, but what do they mean? Usually that the dog in question is able to walk from the van to the ring and run around the ring without tripping over its own legs, or without overheating. There is a growing number of people who actually test breeding dogs, but this is partly due to the outcry of general public, which until recently was blissfully unaware, that e.g. 75% of English Bulldogs are unable to give birth naturally, or that skulls of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels are too small to contain their brains... IMHO if we decide to breed animals, their health and wellbeing should ALWAYS be a priority.

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Originally Posted by satomi325

But as long as an animal is not suffering or is able to thrive and live a quality life, there is no reason to stop breeding certain morphs.

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Agreed. I'm not saying that we should stop breeding morphs at all. I'm just saying that when selecting out of 3 pastels, one muddy looking with good feeding response and good clutch size, one with good, but not outstanding colour and good feeding/clutch, and one with outstanding coloours and pattern, but tricky to feed and breed - I would definitely go with the second one, breed to a better coloured male and use seleciton on the babies, improving on colour and keeping "fitness" as it is.

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Originally Posted by satomi325

If you want a 'defect free' snake, breed normals. All morphs are genetic defects after all.

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Not sure why you say that. I didn't say anything about mutations or "defected morphs". By the way, mutations can be neutral to fitness and deleterious. Majority of morphs are neutral mutations, at least in captivity (in wild they could be deleterious as they would make the snake more visible to predators) so I see absolutely no problem in breeding them, that's what I'm planning to do! I'm just saying that while breeding ANY kind of animal, dog, snake, wild type or morph, the looks should NEVER be the sole factor in selection decisions.

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Originally Posted by satomi325

If the second snake was that much of a problem, she probably would have died on her own or should be culled from a young age. That is not a good quality life if she can't thrive on her own. Especially as an adult.

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Hm, I'm lurking on several forums now and I have seen numerous topics where a breeder admits that a female was a nightmare to feed, laid one or two clutches with mostly slugs, but she's sooo pretty that they just HAVE to try again and again, until they get offspring from her...

I agree about quality but my question is this... what do you do with a low quality morph? You don't want to keep it and you shouldn't sell it. If you decide to drop the price then whoever buys it might breed it and get more of these low quality snakes.

M

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Originally Posted by nykea

Not sure why you say that. I didn't say anything about mutation.

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Because I wasn't referring to you.

The only part I responded to you, I quoted then wrote my opinion after. It was about breeding the average good eater layer vs beautiful bad eater layer.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

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Originally Posted by digizure

I agree about quality but my question is this... what do you do with a low quality morph? You don't want to keep it and you shouldn't sell it. If you decide to drop the price then whoever buys it might breed it and get more of these low quality snakes.

M

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these make great pets. no problem, just sell them as pets, i dont see why they shouldnt be sold. then we have to differentiate between valuable genes and low-budget genes. if you sell your low-quality pastels for 80 dollars or to a pet store, noone will breed them. if you sell your low-quality het toffee or toffino for 1100 dollars, people will likely pick their very best albino, or buy the very best albino they can get their hands on, and breed it to that. But even then i see no problem.

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Originally Posted by Kurtilein

if you sell your low-quality pastels for 80 dollars or to a pet store, noone will breed them.

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You sure of that? Unfortunately there is absolutely no way of ensuring that a sub-quality animal that we sell won't be bred. So my plan is to keep my own standards as high as possible, source from high quality stock and sadly, forget what other people do... However, that goes only for visual quality. If (touch wood it never happens) I have the misfortune of producing an animal with obvious physical abnormality but surviving on its own (when I decide it is a defective but viable snake) I'll either keep it as long as it lives, or place it with my close friends where I can keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn't get bred. I will be happy to pay for his/her accommodation, as I believe it's my responsibility as a breeder - person who brought it to this world.
I already have a "waster" like that living under my roof, a very expensive dog, imported and after champions, was supposed to be a top stud... Well, after his health tests, sadly he will stay a virgin and instead of winning titles he occupies my sofa ;)
Alternatively that defective snake will be put down.

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Originally Posted by nykea

.. IMHO if we decide to breed animals, their health and wellbeing should ALWAYS be a priority.



Agreed. I'm not saying that we should stop breeding morphs at all. I'm just saying that when selecting out of 3 pastels, one muddy looking with good feeding response and good clutch size, one with good, but not outstanding colour and good feeding/clutch, and one with outstanding coloours and pattern, but tricky to feed and breed - I would definitely go with the second one, breed to a better coloured male and use seleciton on the babies, improving on colour and keeping "fitness" as it is.




Not sure why you say that. I didn't say anything about mutations or "defected morphs". By the way, mutations can be neutral to fitness and deleterious. Majority of morphs are neutral mutations, at least in captivity (in wild they could be deleterious as they would make the snake more visible to predators) so I see absolutely no problem in breeding them, that's what I'm planning to do! I'm just saying that while breeding ANY kind of animal, dog, snake, wild type or morph, the looks should NEVER be the sole factor in selection decisions.





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I never said not to breed for health. I did say in my post that breeders breed for the paint job as well as general health. If a baby cannot thrive, it is culled or dies on it's own. Severely Kinked and fused animals are euthanized for example.
But in general, captive ball pythons are hardly unhealthy.

Yes, Im aware of all the issues with dogs. I honestly don't think anyone is 'improving' the breed. And if a dog can't breed on its own or it need C sections every birth, it should just die out. (English Bulldogs or Yorkies for example). Also the reason we don't breed female deserts. The only reason they're still around is because the males are still able to breed safely.

But the difference between pedigree dogs and BPs is that BPs, no matter what type of morph, is physically the same and have the same number of chromosomes as their wild counter parts.
They move, breed, eat, drink, kill, poop etc etc just the same. The snakes who are fatal die in the egg or shortly after hatching, which is the only natural 'selection' occurring in captivity.

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Originally Posted by nykea

Not sure why you say that. I didn't say anything about mutations or "defected morphs". By the way, mutations can be neutral to fitness and deleterious. Majority of morphs are neutral mutations, at least in captivity (in wild they could be deleterious as they would make the snake more visible to predators) so I see absolutely no problem in breeding them, that's what I'm planning to do! I'm just saying that while breeding ANY kind of animal, dog, snake, wild type or morph, the looks should NEVER be the sole factor in selection decisions.

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I agree with everything Jinx stated, but I also like this point you brought up (I didn't read the whole thread :oops:). My calico came from Chris Berrios, and when I did a BOI check before buying, everyone said that Chris' calicos are piggies! I thought they were just being nice, but after almost a year of keeping her, she is most definitely more pig than snake :P. She only refused probably 4 meals the entire time she's been with me, and each of those were either her deep in shed, or the rat exploded because I thawed it for too long :D.... I'm hoping her babies will be the same :gj:.