Quote Originally Posted by Brandon Osborne View Post
MOST of what you mention is due to the gene. As I said before, even with outcrossed animals and new import blood, these things still pop up. Outcrossing spiders, cinnies, black pastels and caramels does not make the abnormalities disappear. It's part of the gene. If you aren't prepaired for the consequences don't work with the genes.

I bred son to mother Pewters in 2009/10 and had a perfectly normal clutch other than producing two very oddly patterned Super Pewters.

I'll reiterate....snakes are non-migratory animals. We have these morphs because of inbreeding in wild populations. It happens because micro-populations exist withing other micro-populations and these snakes live with inbreeding their entire lives. Breeding sibling to sibling, father to daughter, father to grand daughter and so on. Do some research on feild observations by Frank Retes. You may be enlightened.

By the way, I am in no way trying to come off as harsh. Just stating valid points.
This is exactly my understanding after a lot of research. Some populations of animals aren't harmed in any way by in-breeding, and the various python species became the individual species by breeding with their local population rather than a more diverse group. This is how speciation works. If animals didn't split into sub-populations and in-breed, we'd only have one species on the planet, and it wouldn't be us. In-breeding was a huge factor in all the diversity we see in nature.

Humans can successfully breed with close relatives too. The problem comes in when you start doubling up bad recessive genes. Deformities wouldn't happen very often if we in-bred ourselves, but when they do it's so horrifying that we rightly consider close relative breeding a huge taboo.

An example in snakes would be breeding Spider x Spider or Woma x Woma. Get two copies of the mutated gene, and you're screwed. As long as you have no destructive recessive mutations present, you're fine.