Hi,

I am soooo not the person to answer this but I'll have a crack at it.

The first thing to clear up is that we are not breeding for mutations at all.

All the base morphs we know of originated in the wild. We may combine them to make designer morphs but that's all we can do. I don't think I have heard of anyone having a morph spontaneously created in a captive population, proving out WC snakes yes, but not generating something new.

Likewise all the morphs that do have some kind of problems ( spiders wobble, caramels can kink, cinamons and black pastels can have duckbills, BEL's can have bug eyes etc. ) are the way they are without man interfering.

If people spend enough generations breeding for traits then it is possible that they will create a situation similar to what we see in dogs but we are not even at the beginning of that process yet.

There also seems to be a difference between mammalian genetics and reptilian in terms of robustness to mutation and copy errors but I , honestly, do not know enough about this to even have a guess at reasons and results.

So, to answer your question as best I can, the only problems with mutations are the ones nature dealt out and aside form the known problems the animals themselves seem to be just as robust and healthy as the wild type.

But, as noted in the dog question, we are only just at the very, very beginning of this process and most, if not all, the morphs haven't been around long enough to truly know how their lifespan compares to the wild type etc.


dr del