caramel kinking issue

[reptiledanny]

hi, dont really post much, but wanted to ask a question
i at the moment only have the two ball pythons, my het pied pair. at the moment i am trying to breed them to produce a pied.
my plans are i want to work alot with pieds and caramels. i want to mix them together, add other things, my main goals are caramel pieds, albino pieds, caramel glows and mojave caramels.
the issue i have is the caramel kinking. alot of my plans inc dh caramels, and then breeding caramals x caramels. i know caramels have the kinking issue, and many people say only really breed hets to visuals.
what do you think with it, like one of my plans was maybe to breed the caramel glow to the mojave caramel to get mojave caramels het hypo, but this is a caramel x caramel breeding.
has anyone got any insights to this. is it completely true that lowering the incubation temps lowers alot of the kinking risks
help
thanks

[RandyRemington]

I think the reason people use het rather than visual caramel females is because homozygous caramel females apparently have trouble laying good eggs. If you can manage to get some good eggs from a caramel female I wouldn't expect the percentage of kinks in the caramel babies to be any higher than the percentage of kinks in the caramel babies from a het caramel girl.

[reptiledanny]

ahhh ok. well i have seen quite a few people over her in the uk with female caramels producing good eggs, so will source someone that has had females lay good eggs to hopefully get a good line and then go from there

[paulh]

Mild vitamin deficiencies in the females have caused stillborn babies and a variety of birth defects in a number of domestic animals. Defects include (but are not limited to) abnormal bone growth in trout, chickens, and humans. Cage bird breeders and prenatal caregivers for humans fortify the diet with extra vitamins on a routine basis. If difficulty with absorbing or using a vitamin is associated with the caramel mutant gene, then fortifying the ball python's diet might be helpful.

Lowering egg incubation temperature slows growth. This might allow a baby caramel to make the best use of the available vitamins to minimize abnormal bone growth. That could be the reason for lowering the incubation temperature reducing the kinking problem.

[Domepiece]

There are plenty of threads on here about kinking in caramels, do a quick search.

[RandyRemington]

reptiledanny, any chance you can find out if the breeders who have good clutches from homozygous caramel females use rodents fed the same commercial feed brand?

There are a few breeders in the US and Canada who report long strings of non-kinked caramels. At one point it looked like they might all be using Mazuri 6F rodent feed but then I found a breeder who reported kinks and claimed to be using that rodent feed.

[coldbloodaddict]

It would really suck to put a bunch of years and money into making Kinked Caramel Combos!!!

Get an Ultramel!!!

[WingedWolfPsion]

Yes, why not just use Ultramel or Crider, instead? I know Caramels have their fans, but to be honest, that gene can produce some physical deformities that can be lethal. Since ultramel looks very similar, why work with the Caramel gene at all?
This isn't like the spider gene, where the animals are uncoordinated but functional...some kinked snakes can be folded in half, and unable to pass food through their body.