morphs or hets or normal

I love my normal bp but i've read some of the posts and man its like just stay with the normal and your safe...i would love to get a pastel morph or a ghost but whats better paying an arm and a leg for a morph or keeping your fingers crossed and hope you have a het...where can i find a morph thats priced right help :?:

Unfortunately, I dont think you will find a "morph" at the "right" price, unless spending a few thou is no big deal. Morphs are just expensive. And, if you are just into bp's for pets, why put out that kind of $ anyhow. As far as a "het", if you are not going to breed, why get one... "het" for anything dont mean nothing but big $ signs if you are just keeping it as a pet.

LOL.....you'd know if you had a het. Ball Pythons aren't like cornsnakes. When people breed for morphs, they make sure to get thier investment money back in either hets or the morphs themselves. Unless you paid an exorbited amount for your snake....its a normal.

Why buy pastel hets when you can buy a nice pastel for under 900.

Man, back during November pastels were all the freaking rage, seriously. Seems their fame has died down. This thread made me think bout it.

Pastels are so cute...
http://www.vpi.com/4VPIInventory/VPI...1Aug01)j01.jpg

Because a pastel is a pastel het. Super pastel is the homozygous form. :)

I know, hehe I'm not used to hets showing it, so I keep grouping them with morphs. If it looks diff, morph in my mind. So what, they a morph, morph het? Where do they belong, lol. I consider pastels and supers diff morphs.

I think pastel qualifies as a morph because its phenotype (appearance) is visibly different from normal. Same with burgandy balls, genetic stripes, spiders, platinums, albinos, etc. I guess you could characterize super pastel as a different morph, but it's really just the homozygous form of the same morph, even though its appearance is different.

man oh man...how bout a super mojave....im a sucker for the mojaves. im surprised it hasnt happened yet. its been tried but the female did get out any eggs. i think thats how it went...

I believe we'll find out later this year if the mojaves have a "super" form. I'm hoping!

I hope so, too, and that within the next season or two we'll find out which morphs actually produce the leucistics. They are so beautiful!

Bob clark has lucy "hets" already. They are called Fire Balls. Leucistics are now considered a co-dom trait. Fire balls are the "het" so to speak (just like the pastel is the "het" super pastel). You breed a fire ball to a normal and you get 50% fire balls and 50% normals. You breed two fire ball together and you get 50% fireballs and 50% leucistics. There is another line of leucistics that is recessive until proven otherwise. I personally don't consider it a lucy because it has a faint pattern, but it has blue eyes which is just amazing. You can get more info at bob clark's website (www.bobclark.com).



Jennifer

Jen, I'm actually aware of all that, but as you probably know, three different types of leucistics have been identified and only the fireball type is known for semi-certain publicly what its genotype is. There's some discussion that platty x axanthic or albino x ? may be the path to the other forms of leucistic bp's.

Yup, leucistics will be fun for sure..:P

Mojaves are so freaking sweet... but at the moment the only morph I want is a real sweet pastel :)

If fireball is het black eyed leucistic (I think it is very very likely based on the info disclosed so far, however, as the original breeder is adamantly pointing out on kingsnake it isn't yet a 100% sure thing) then fireball X fireball will produce babies that each have a 25% chance of being black eyed leucistic, 50% chance of being fireballs, and 25% chance of being normal. Don't get confused about the morph type (recessive, co-dominant, dominant) we are still talking het X het here so you would not get 50/50 firballs and leucistics. I know it's easy to mess up but I find thinking of the genotype (fireball =? het) helps me keep it straight.

From his web site I see that Vin Russo is using the perhaps more correct term "incomplete dominant" for his blue eyed leucy where what he believes to be the hets he is calling High Yellow Lemons. I think I remember seeing these for sale before he produced the leucy and thinking they where overpriced, darn, wish I could have bought one at twice the price now! I didn't find any pics of his High Yellow Lemons now (maybe I was looking at something else before).

The SnakeKeeper is calling their Ivory codominant. IMHO this might well be closely related to the other yellow stripe type leucistics but just with a little more color. They don't post a picture of give a name for the het form that I can find but I've heard people say that it might be what's called a "yellow belly".

I can't seem to find it right now but I thought I read where Peter Kahl indicated that his leucistic had normal looking babies. I would actually be a little surprised at this point if his wasn't codominant but I have seen very little info on what is going on with that project. Anyone have a link to any published info on what the babies looked like?

I believe that Ralph Davis is indicating that his leucistics might be recessive. Certainly that is a possibility but given that both parents where co-dominant morphs (and a little similar in my eyes) and all the other apparently co-dominant leucistic like balls popping up I'm suspicious that his are co-dominant too.

I remember reading on someone's site -- not sure whose, sorry -- that the author believed that ball python coloring was made up of a layer of white at the base and then layers of black, reddish brown, yellowish brown, and yellow. If this is correct, then it seems to me that there might be a few ways to produce leucistic-appearing animals: promote white to the top layer (black-eyed, I'm guessing), suppress all the other colors (blue-eyed, I'm guessing), incompletely suppress yellow and suppress all others (the faint yellow stripe), promote white and incompletely suppress yellow (faint yellow). If this is correct, then the first two lines ought to be incompatible with one another and the last two, but the last two might be compatible. Rather than being passed as genetic color-coding, it may be passed as lacking an enzyme or half an enzyme pair, which would explain incomplete or co-dominance.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of info and photos available yet on lucy offspring. It'll probably be another 2-5 seasons before we really have the answers to most of the questions we have about these beauties, and possibly longer before line compatibility is established.

As the breeder of the Black-eyed leucistic, I will not make any claim as to whether they are a co-dominant or simple recessive gene until I have the results of this year's breeding. The lucy male has been bred to his mother,a Fireball female and four normal females. Bob Clark may well be right in saying that it is co-dominant, but I need to prove the theory beyond doubt. Eric Davies.

Right after I posted this morning I realized that I incorrectly referred to Platy and Phantom as co-dominant. I guess at this point all we know is that they are "some kind of dominant" although I think the will turn out to be co-dominant.

But it brings up a good question, how much proof is enough? Could you ever really be 100% sure? What if they had a recessive gene that just happened to be linked on the same chromosome with a co-dominant gene? You might go a long time without separating the two and proving the effect of the recessive gene as not co-dominant. I guess the big checker will be if the leucy doesn't produce any normals no matter what he is bred to. But how many babies will be enough to be sure?

Eric, thanks for stopping in and contributing to the discussion. I certainly look forward to seeing what you produce with these and what we can learn of the genetics involved.

Randy, you raise a good point. I don't think we can ever be 100% sure without genetic testing and profiling. For our purposes, though, I'd think that if the leucistic produces no normals when it's bred with normals and other morphs, then that will be good enough evidence for me.

Eric,
We are glad to have you here, and would love to hear more about your breeding projects, if you are willing to share your knowledge and/or tips!

Even if one leucistic male produces only a large number of fireballs bred to normals it still would not be proven beyond any shadow of doubt. Both of his parents where fireballs, maybe he is homozygous for a dominant or even co-dominant fireball gene but it's covered by a separate recessive leucistic gene. I guess the test would be if after a large number of leucistics where produced only from fireball and/or leucistic pairs and none of those leucistics ever produced normal babies.

I guess my point is again along the lines of "can you ever really prove anything". It seems like there will always be some small chance it isn't working the way we think it is (linked genes, sex linking, spontaneous mutations, etc.) but eventually you have to say there is enough evidence and move on. I applaud being cautious and as technically correct as possible. Hopefully this year's breedings will add enough data to satisfy everyone. In the mean time I suppose any potential buyers (if anything is even for sale yet) would have to weigh all available data and make up their own minds. I'm confident that it's co-dominant from what I've read but then again I don't have the funds to be a potential buyer so it really doesn't matter what I think.

Well, if there's more than one type of leucism in ball pythons, as there appears to be, it is also possible that we could have multiple dominance types, say co-dominant and recessive. I don't think we'll have enough data after this year's hatchings to be sure, but we should have enough data to give people a good idea of what their best bet is financially, if they're even in the ballpark.

I agree with you, Marla...I think it'll take a couple more generations (at least) to figure out what's going on with all the different Lucy's. Investing in them at this point would be a gamble...but it's probably not too risky of one.

One thing I've wondered....if the Lucys get ironed out and become more common...what will that do to the Snowball? Will people still be as enamored with a very expensive "almost white" snake when a true pure white one becomes available?

I don't think investing in a lucy is really much of a gamble as long as it's a healthy, feeding snake and F1 or greater so we know it's not impotent as a result of the leucism. Any healthy lucy should be able to produce more of the same in a generation or two, depending on dominance, and even hets are amazingly valuable at this point.

That's a good question about the snowballs, and I'll bet they will drop a bit with F2 and F3 leucistics getting out to more breeders, but I'm betting they'll still be valuable for years to come. Albinos have held their value very well even though they were the first proven bp morph, and I think to a degree the value of the morphs is based on how much it differs from the normal phenotype. That explains why blackbacks and burgundies can be had for a few hundred but albinos, spiders, and pastels are all multiple thousands of dollars.

I guess what I meant by Lucy's being a gamble is that I'm not 100% convinced on the whole co-dom thing with Fireballs and such. I'd hate to plop down tens of thousands of dollars on a pair of fireballs...only to find out they don't really make Lucys. Of course...if I HAD that kind of money to put down on some snakes, then I'm sure I could get a lot more info from the breeders about their track-records than we see on public websites, too!

I'm just looking forward to seeing how these play out and what their genetics actually are. Black-eyed or blue...they're both beautiful!

Agreed completely, Judy. Of course, if I had that kind of money to spend on snakes, I'd probably be making some African contacts to find out about distinctive wc snakes before they hit the shores here.

Oohhhh, wouldn't that be fun???
Of course, there's some serious gambling going on when you do that. Not only gambling on the genetics, but also on the health of the snake and if it will adjust to captivity well enough to breed. Still....if I had that kind of "spare" money rolling around....that'd be a more fun gamble than any table in Vegas!

Exactly! And the odds aren't going to be as likely to be as stacked against you because your exporters know you're more likely to come back and spend more big bucks if you were satisfied with the condition of the animals you bought before. Parasites, sure, a little dehydrated, ok, but live arrival and no neuro symptoms or obvious starvation for the big $$ snakes. How fun would that be, to call up your guy in Africa and say, "I need the next piebald you find, and I need it in good shape"?