Randy that is very, VERY interesting to me about the lack of musculature in the bowel of your het pieds. It does seem to be incriminating as, without a doubt, megacolon and other digestive disorders are strongly associated with piebaldism in mammals (as already stated) due to the contribution of neural crest cells to enteric nerve plexuses.

However ... Yours were *het* pieds.

Does anyone know if heterozygous piebald mice have any digestive (or other health) problems?

Of course, then the really big question -- which I'm sure folks are reluctant to answer -- is: do pied ball pythons have a higher mortality rate than other mutations?

JayCee, I think you're very right that messing around with conformation, size, etc., definitely tends to lead to genetic health problems in animals much more often than color mutations ... However, all of these single-gene color mutations are due to SOME sort of defect in a protein SOMEWHERE in the animal. And for all those defective proteins, you would think at least SOME would have epistatic effects (effects on things other than just color/pattern) ...