Harlequin Wide-Stripe

[Robyn@SYR]

I will chime in here only briefly, busy day here at PE and SYR : )

We started working with some "wild stripe" stuff back in the 90's. The epitome of the dinker project, at the time. We hatched a couple of fully striped babies, but this was before the Ball python morph craze, so I didn't recognize the significance of it. I sold one of those full PE stripes to Tracy at VPI, way back when.

We raised some, including partial stripes, and while VMS Sean was working here at PE, he picked up some of that line.

I don't know when they became "Harlequin", but I have never referred to them that way. At this point, we just call them PE Stripes.

I STILL don't understand how they work. There is a great variance in the amount of striping, from full stripe, to partial stripes, to no stripes. That keyhole feature comes into play often as well. But it is all so unpredictable.

We really started making some progress with our "Double Het Ghost PE Stripes". We bred a PE Stripe (not a fantastic one, just a mostly striped one) to a Ghost/Hypo. Those babies all looked normal. After raising them up for 6 or 7 years, we bred them back together and got PE Stripe Ghosts. The striping still varies animal to animal, or doesn't appear at all. Some of those Ghost PE Stripes are pictured below, along with some of the better PE Stripes.

We have also done Pin PE Stripes and Lesser PE Stripes...

Ghost PE Stripe from 2010- from normal appearing Double Het parents:




The best "plain" PE Stripes appear like this: