When I started breeding ball pythons, my fiancee and I talked about morphs we'd be really interested in working with in the future. One of the first things that came to mind was the super black pastel. I love solid black snakes and thought that super black pastels were just breathtaking. We picked up a black pastel male, Titus, a perfect specimen, our first year of collecting and he happened to be het for ghost. He's my little angel and a year later we bought him a future girlfriend, nasty little Drusilla, who's a little bug-eyed, but not bad, who's also het for ghost. After we saw the black pastel ghost for the first time we lost our minds with all that orange and lavender, and our dream became the super black pastel ghost, presumably an all deep lavender snake. Well, both of our kids are sizeable and Titus is already hooking up with other gals, but I hesitate to throw him in with Dru.

I've heard about the potential for deformities amongst black pastel offspring, particularly in super black pastels. So my question is: how real are these fears? I mean, plenty of people breed out caramel albinos without kinking issues, even though it can happen. I mean, if it's a 50% shot of a horrible deformity, I wouldn't consider it, but I'm just not sure. You know how it is. You hear the horror stories, not a lot of the positive ones. We already changed our BEL plans this year to avoid a lesser x lesser pairing because of the 50% shot of bug-eyes.

So, I'd love to hear from my black pastel peeps, especially those of you that have produced super black pastels. What's your experience been on the matter?