A few ?'s

[murray2213]

I want to start breeding with in the next few years so now is the time to soak up all the info I can.

I want to pick up a few 08/09 little ones so in 2-3 years they will be ready to breed. With co-dom or recessive morphs would I be better of breeding 100% Hets or breeding the morph to another morph? Would the 3x the price for the morphs be worth spending for the % gained in achieving the desired offspring?

Any info or experiences anyone has is very much appreciated!

[Sloanreptiles]

Well yes breeding a visual to visual of recessive morphs is supposed to produce 100% visuals while het to het has 25% chance of each egg being a visual. Only reason I say supposed to produce 100% for visual to visual is our good friend Lynn Kubic of Boas and Balls breed Pied to Pied and got unlucky enough to produce one het lol Shoulda seen her face when she pulled it out of the egg.

[kc261]

our good friend Lynn Kubic of Boas and Balls breed Pied to Pied and got unlucky enough to produce one het lol Shoulda seen her face when she pulled it out of the egg.

I'd be really curious to see a picture of that snake. Is there any chance it was just a super low white pied? Or any chance it was sperm from a different male?

If not, I wonder what happened. Spontaneous mutation?

[Sloanreptiles]

Not sure if she sold it or not but it was for sure not a pied, normal looking in everyway. As far as a different male she doesn't own a breeder het pied male. Not sure what happened, just really unlucky lol.

[Bluebead]

IMO The cheapest way to produce high end recessive morphs without dealing with possible hets is to breed a visual male to het females.
That way all hatchlings are at least hets, you should get 50/50 visual/hets.
I would buy your het females now and wait a year on your male since prices continue to come down. If possible I would buy a male that was a combo; IE a pastel pied or something like that.

You could go with het x het to start but then you have to deal with 3/4 of the clutch being possible hets.... IMO its not worth it.
I have a bunch of hets that are going to be ready next year but I'll be moving to visual males asap. I may even skip using the hets and just buy visual or combo visual males.

In the end it all comes down to how much you can spend, but really when you think about how much you get for a normal or poss het you would be better off both in time expenditure and financially working with visual x het.

My 2 cents

[mpenny]

Every one is talking about recessive genes. Codoms are a good bet also. Buy a codom male and a couple normal girls and 1/2 the babies should be codom. The down side the other 1/2 are normal. Get 2 codoms depending on what you get you could get a super. 2 diffrent codoms you could end up with a combo morph. If you are starting out with babies get females this year and a male next year.

[kc261]

With co-dom or recessive morphs would I be better of breeding 100% Hets or breeding the morph to another morph?

I wasn't sure what you meant by this question. That could be because I'm being dense at the moment, it was poorly worded, or it might be because you don't understand genetics very well. If you don't feel like you got the answers you want, try re-wording the question and/or studying genetics a little bit.

As far as the other question about is the increased morph offspring worth the extra expense... it all depends on what the market does. No one can predict that for sure. It is possible that every penny you invest in BPs will be lost because they'll be illegal before you can get any hatchlings. It is possible that the fact that the prices on everything is going up will eventually leak into the BP world and we'll actually see at least some prices start to go back up. Or anywhere in between. You just have to make your best guess, and don't invest more than you can afford to lose. Also, if you don't know this already, you should understand that very few people actually make a profit breeding BPs.