When Breeding Dinkers?

[dracovolans]

I have a doubt about breeding dinkers.

Why when someone have something "special" most of the time they prefer to breed them to other morphs instead of a normal to prove the genetics?

For example I'm going to mention the Garcia Project from Randy http://www.ball-pythons.net/forums/s...ad.php?t=90827

I think the original mom is beautiful and by breeding her to a Mojave after other parings in past years now what he has is a cool Mojaves but not sure about the original genes of the mother.

Wouldn't be easy to use for example a high quality normal to make sure you can prove your dinker to be a Dom, Co-dom or recesive?

I hope I make my point clear, after I wrote the thread I read it I'm not sure if it is.

[rabernet]

Well, I have a dinker male who I have gotten opinions on from several respected breeders. He bred to a normal last year and is with one of my darker normals this year to see if what we suspect happens.

I probably will breed him to a pastel female later down the road, but then, I will have also had plenty of time to work with his daughters from a normal.

[RebelYell83]

a lot of breeders dont keep normal girls around,one point would be when russo made the het lucy a few years back,he bred it to a het albino instead of a normal,then in either 07 or 08,that het finally came to light and he produce the combo accidently.or if the dinker in question is a female,almost no breeders keep normal males around.but even if its co dom,if an obvious combo comes from the breeding,then you can see it,so sometimes its easier to spot the fact it is proving out when breeding to a morph,as it will highlight the morph,sometimes making it more of a slap to the forehead then just the subtle differences in the morph compared to a normal

[EmberBall]

Back several years ago, the Sutherlands tried proving out their Coffee Ball. This took several years, (I cannot remember if the original animal was male or female) of breedings, breeding this back to that, etc. If I remember correctly, they used a Pastel male for the breedings, and got Pastel babies to use in their projects. The snake did NOT prove out, and if they followed your logic, they would have made a plethora of normals, for no reason.

I would say, use a simple recessive if you are concerned, or match up a nice male or female with your dinker animal. If you have a granite looking dinker, breed it to a Pastel Yb-which is what I did this year. If you have a hypo looking dinker snake, breed it to a Ghost, which again, is what I did with the Ember Ball and what Eric and I did with the Sulfur.

Again, most breeders do not even have a normal male in their collection.

Dave

[kc261]

I would think it would depend a lot on the individual animal. For example, if you have a cinnamon-like dinker, it would make a lot of sense to pair it with another cinnamon. If you get a super, you know not only is it a genetic morph, but that it is compatible with the existing cinnamon lines. Of course, there is the downside that if you don't get a super, you would not know if the cinnamon babies came from the dinker or the snake with known genetics, but you still could make an educated guess based on how many cinnamons were produced.

It will also depend a lot on what the breeder has available. As has already been pointed out, most breeders are not going to have a normal male available for pairing with a dinker female. A dinker male could possibly be paired with a few different females to see what pops out when combined with different morphs. This might be pretty likely to happen at a big breeder, especially if the dinker looks particularly promising. However, a small breeder is unlikely to be willing to devote more than one female, as that would represent a significant percentage of their production for the year.

[PythonWallace]

Like Dave said, most people don't have normal males, so if the dinker is a female, it's the only option. If it's a male dinker, you'd want to breed it to a proven morph, because if it proves out, you will already be working with combos, and if it doesn't prove out you at least hatched out some morphs from the experiment, and won't be producing a bunch of clutches of unwanted normals.

[Fearless]

If I recall with the garcia morph as stated before, I believe Randy had already been involved in proving it as a dom possibly codom morph prior to breeding it with the mojave. And think that the idea of breeding it to the mojave was to prove it or disprove it as being part of the white snake complex, such as lesser mojave, het russo.

[Nagini88]

i'm breeding a few dinkers this year, I'm breeding a dinkerxdinker and a dinker/cinnimon pastel(she would compliment it well)

I also got a wc mom this year that was gravid. ended up with a baby that looked like her, and 2 with unique head markings(1 was also a ringer)

[RandyRemington]

If I recall with the garcia morph as stated before, I believe Randy had already been involved in proving it as a dom possibly codom morph prior to breeding it with the mojave. And think that the idea of breeding it to the mojave was to prove it or disprove it as being part of the white snake complex, such as lesser mojave, het russo.

Yes, with her I wanted to breed to mojave when I first got her and even wrote TSK about her seven or eight years ago. I see now that she doesn't have the right shaped alien eyes but at the time mojave looked the most like her of anything I had seen (I might not have even known about the mojave being het white snake then but still I would love a white snake today). With the Garcia it might be a little easier figuring things out if I had used a normal male but I didn't even own a mojave before her 2008 babies so the breeding loan was a way for me to get mojave and have a shot at two morphs in one baby. I'm glad I did it based on the mojave Garcia 08 female even if I'm not sure about her brother.

I have another female dinker who finally gave me a clutch in the incubator now:



Not the best pic but she is sort of an axanthic/IMG girl. She was more striking when I first got her here shown on the left:



I bred her to a pastel het ghost as sort of a security policy per another post above. If none of her babies look like her I'll have to hang on to at least a few in case it's recessive. But if it turns out not to be genetic at all it would be nice to have maybe a pastel possibible het ghost male and a few pastel and normal possible het ghost girls rather than pure normals after I raise them up for a few years.

Because a female can have at most one clutch a year it's a big investment to decide what to breed her too. The Garcia girl's eggs aren't looking too good by the way so maybe I'll have to wait until 9 years after picking her up to finally hatch my own. With a dinker male I would be more likely to try a normal pairing since it wouldn't necisarilly use up 100% of his anual (or longer) breeding potential like with a female. By the way, the classic jungle on the right in the above picture was a male but since they have not proven genetic and I thought it was likely caused by egg stress I gave him away without even breeding him. Even a normal female's potential clutch is a valuable thing to spend lightly.