Spontaneous Pigment Loss

[Lolo76]

One of our Orange Hypo lost part of her pigmentation this spring, she is regaining her colors slowly.

Dude... if you weren't an honest person (which I assume you are), you could totally sell that as a new *insert made-up morph name* for like $20K! I don't know what causes this phenomenon, but it sure does make them look sweet for a while.

[Lolo76]

Link to that old thread on pigment loss: http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...r+pigmentation

Original pictures aren't showing anymore, but there are some later in the thread - and it really looks like an axanthic spider. Very cool! The thread is interesting anyway, so I suggest giving it a read.

[stevepoppers]

Here's the one about the mojave: http://www.ball-pythons.net/forums/s...ghlight=mojave

Really frickin' cool!

[Serpent_Nirvana]

So I'm noticing these are all females, and I seem to recall the spider was, too. Could this be partly a hormonal thing? Like the equivalent of a hormonal blue green tree python?

In this girl's case, that would kinda sorta make sense as she had laid about a month (? have to check with my friend on that) before. However, I had another one do a similar thing earlier last year that was actually a young male. His was slightly different, though:




I think that perhaps the reason this female looks so "ghost-y" while he had more of a high-contrast look could be because she was a "burgundy" before, with less black pigment to begin with.

I had read that it was a metabolic stress thing ... I could hypothesize that it happens if a sufficiently stressful event happens to the snake while it's synthesizing new pigment for its next shed cycle. But that doesn't explain why it ONLY happens to the brown pigment and not the black. I also don't know enough about the exact physiology of shedding and pigment synthesis to carry that hypothesis too far ... Time to crack open some textbooks, I think ...

For those who mentioned IMG, I had thought that the snake only ever got darker, not lighter ... Am I wrong? Do IMGs sometimes start out normal, blanch out and then darken up from there?

[bones93]

Ill chime in here...The above article had some interesting info. I dont know of this will prove out to be anything at all but here is a pic of my male bee that is doin this now. He has been like this for about 3 months thru a few sheds and it seems to be getting more pronounced rather than goin back to normal.

[cboocks]

Ill chime in here...The above article had some interesting info. I dont know of this will prove out to be anything at all but here is a pic of my male bee that is doin this now. He has been like this for about 3 months thru a few sheds and it seems to be getting more pronounced rather than goin back to normal.

That Bee looks AWESOME!

[h00blah]

Ill chime in here...The above article had some interesting info. I dont know of this will prove out to be anything at all but here is a pic of my male bee that is doin this now. He has been like this for about 3 months thru a few sheds and it seems to be getting more pronounced rather than goin back to normal.

wow
since some people have snakes that are like that, wouldn't it suck if someone tried to use it as a scam?? sell their normal as an axanthic...

[Serpent_Nirvana]

Ill chime in here...The above article had some interesting info. I dont know of this will prove out to be anything at all but here is a pic of my male bee that is doin this now. He has been like this for about 3 months thru a few sheds and it seems to be getting more pronounced rather than goin back to normal.

Actually it was your bee that made me think of it (Well, that and the fact that my female normal changed color a last week, ha!)

It does seem to me as though spiders are still a bit overrepresented, though I do appreciate those who posted links/pictures of other morphs undergoing the change ... So it's definitely not just spiders!

Bones, did anything "unusual" happen to your snake before he started changing colors? Any bad feeders or feeders from a different source maybe?

[bones93]

I dont think so. He has been eating ASFs from the same person I always get them from. I plan on breeding him this season so maybe ill hold a few back and see if this is something that maybe passes on. I hope he stays like this LOL

My girlfriend came to me about 2 weeks ago and said "what the hell happened to the bee?" I got all scared and was like "what do you mean?" LOL she said she thought I bought a new snake until she looked on the feeding card

[Genefreak339]

Few pics of a pinstripe I picked up at daytona... Supposedly axanthic pin..