My male ball is het for... something?

[PixieMaple]

Hi guys,

a few weeks ago, I got a normal male from a herp place. The owner of the place says he gets all his normal balls from a guy who breeds fancier morphs, who puts all the normals from each clutch together, then wholesales them.

This basically means my guy could be het for a multitude of things. Is there any way to find out what?

If I bred him, would the results be unpredictable?

[Patrick Long]

There is absolutely ZERO way for you to tell.

Unless you had a visual morph of every recessive trait out there.

[snakesRkewl]

A needle in a haystack comes to mind.

You could many spend years trying to figure out what if anything it was het for.

It's a normal now

[redstormlax12]

There are belly markers for some morphs such as piebalds. But really you have no way of knowing besides testing him with a plethora or morphs. And it may turn out that he isn't het for anything.

The more likely scenario is he is only poss het for something. Sometimes since there is really no way of knowing breeders will sell poss hets as normals. But thats usually not the case.

As far as breeding results. It depends what you breed him too. If you were to breed him it would only be useful to breed him to a 100% het or visual recessive morph such as albino or piebald.

[PixieMaple]

Thanks
Was just a passing thought really - I definitely won't go crazy trying to breed out some possible het in him. I might go with the visual morph breeding idea, though, as he is of breeding age now

[snakemansnakes]

Hi guys,

a few weeks ago, I got a normal male from a herp place. The owner of the place says he gets all his normal balls from a guy who breeds fancier morphs, who puts all the normals from each clutch together, then wholesales them.

This basically means my guy could be het for a multitude of things. Is there any way to find out what?

If I bred him, would the results be unpredictable?

Or it could just mean that the snake u got came out of a co-dom clutch, which in that case there would be no hets involved

[Serpent_Nirvana]

Or it could just mean that the snake u got came out of a co-dom clutch, which in that case there would be no hets involved

This makes the most sense to me; I've actually been seeing a few adds lately for lots of normal co-dom siblings.

I couldn't quite imagine someone wholesaling a known 100% het for anything female off to a pet store ... Even a known het male, it seems as though it'd be more worth it to sell it as what it is, no?

I could see someone doing that with possible hets, though, maybe ... And if that's the case, and if this becomes more common, I can't help but wonder if we're going to see more and more recessive surprises popping up in the near future.

[snakemansnakes]

Thanks kitt. It wouldn't make sense any other way

[Kevin_Hornby]

Het males aren't really worth it for a breeder to keep. Het Pied, Albino, even clown males are only worth $50 on a good day. If you end up keeping it for more than a month or 2 you start losing big, food, bedding, rack space, etc gets expensive. I know a lot of local breeders that sell 100% het males to pet stores.

The cheapest way to prove out your snake will be to get a normal female (or a few) and breed him to them, hold back all the female babies and breed the father through them all again. If he is a Het for something, then it should be passed onto half of his babies, you'd have like a 12.5% chance per egg of producing a recessive (if the father actually is a het)