Breeding with only homozygous snakes.

[Serpent_Nirvana]

I've wondered occasionally about the status of wild-type ball pythons in the hobby. When I was first getting into BPs, I hadn't planned on getting any wild-types -- I picked up several female morphs and planned on never adding any normals. But then a friend was selling a really huge, friendly, nice-looking normal female, and ... Well ...

I don't think wild-type BPs are going to go away in breeder's collections any time soon, for a number of reasons. For one, even a normal female can be hugely valuable -- and produce very few or even zero wild-type babies -- if bred to the right male. A male killerbee, for example, would produce half pastels, half bees if bred to a normal female. If that's a giant female who produces a ten-egg clutch -- that girl is a great asset!

I know that I have seen giant, 2500+ gram morph females out there, but they seem to be quite rare. I know that in chinchilla breeding, although the mutation colors can sell for more than standards, any serious breeder would shun you if you said you never planned to have standards in your herd. It's conventional wisdom that standards are "stronger" genetically than mutations, and while I seriously question if this has been overstated, there does seem to be some truth to it -- generally, the more mutation genes a baby chinchilla carries, the lower its birth weight for most litters. I wonder if it may be the same way for wild-type versus morph ball pythons.

Finally, in terms of there being an overabundance of unwanted normals ... Even if I did think that were totally true, or it becomes true in the future, I don't think that it's indiscriminate breeding that will cause it. I think it would be more due to the 1000's of CH babies that are being imported each year and sold for $8-12 a head. And there, you have to think, if people weren't buying 'em, other people wouldn't be expending all the time and effort and money to import them ... So somebody must be buying normals.

And, as if I haven't rambled enough, I'll say one more thing: I have yet to experience it firsthand, so I'm not gonna pretend to be preaching from experience, but I have a strong suspicion that carefully selected wild-type animals can be very useful in altering and improving your morphs over future generations.