Quote Originally Posted by einster View Post
i just got my first caramel albino and it is perfect. i want some advice on what i should be looking to breed it with to avoid kinking down the line. one thing for instance i would like to know is should i go caramel to caramel or are hets safe to go with? i am looking to create some funky caramel morphs and put a new twist on some that are already out there. any ideas would be appreciated. thanks this is my first time posting so if i did anything wrong please bear with me. i am a fan of ball pythons and i got about 10 different morphs and this seems like a good place to learn.

I am planning to avoid caramel x caramel -- not because of the kinking potential (in theory, that shouldn't make a difference; I've also read plenty of accounts of kinks from het x het or het x visual). I'm planning of avoid it because of these threads:

http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...-on-Eggs-Photo

http://www.reptileradio.net/reptiler...ad.php?t=20146

... Now, these don't definitively prove that caramel females are sub-fertile, but it's enough to make me want to use mostly caramel males and het females for my projects. (I'm getting into caramels now as well ...) That's just personal opinion, though -- you may read something totally different out of those threads, or feel that the sample size is too small, etc., etc.. It is a fairly small sample size to draw definitive conclusions.

I, too, am hoping to make some neat caramel combos, and my plan so far is to buy a caramel male this year (already paid for; waiting on the weather ), breed him to some morphs this season to make female hets, raise them up for a year, then buy an unrelated 2nd caramel male (hatchling) in 2013 or 2014 to breed to the het females. That's just my plan, though -- I think there are quite a few ways to do it.

My original plan was to buy a caramel pair this year and hold back male hets to breed to the female. I changed that though when it started to seem to me as though the females' fertility may be less than stellar ... I'm not saying that you shouldn't buy female caramels. I just wanted to hedge my bets.

As far as avoiding kinks, I'm not sure how to do that 100% -- I don't know if it's even possible. "Rumor" has it that some lines kink more than others, and some breeders *claim* to have produced few to no kinks. With that in mind, I looked for a baby from a clutch with no kinks, and a track record of few kinks in the line. I'm still prepared for the possibility of kinked babies, though. (Not looking forward to it, but prepared for it.)