Quote Originally Posted by Krynn View Post
I dont think there is a lot of line breeding in ball pythons, but due to the nature of the market I think it would be terrible if it did happen. Most breeders sell their pythons to other breeders, or hobbiests that plan on breeding. If there were line bred animals, their progeny would quickly suffer from outbreeding depression as soon as someone bred them to another line.
I'm not sure outbreeding depression would apply to snakes that were line bred unless they were line bred for an excessive length of time, say 50 generations, during which they may accumulate enough genetic mutations to make them significantly different from the rest of the population. It helps that we're still getting snakes imported from the wild. I would be very interested to see a genetic study of captive snake populations.