Albino to Albino breeding

[Serpent_Nirvana]

I've asked this question in the past as well, but at the same time, I don't quite see why it should be a concern. No matter the species or the morph, I just can't think of any reason why breeding two totally out-crossed, unrelated homozygous animals together would pose any more risk of deformity than breeding homozygous to heterozygous or even two hets.

The major reason I think there's a stigma against breeding recessive visuals together is inbreeding. Chances are, heterozygous animals are going to be more outcrossed, so breeding a visual to a het decreases your chances of doubling up on a bad gene (and getting something homozygous for bad).

Take albino boas, for an easy example. My guess is that many albino boas are heterozygous for an eyeless gene. Breed albino to albino and you're more likely to get a few that are homozygous eyeless, and won't have eyes. However, you could also get a "double het" het albino het eyeless boa, and as J Mitchell above mentioned, he's seen eyeless boas out of het x het breedings. It's probably more likely in visual albinos, since they are less likely to be outcrossed and more likely to still be associated with the eyeless gene, but breeding albino x albino may be just slightly more likely to bring out the eyeless trait -- that type of breeding isn't "causing" it, and it's still possible to get deformities out of het breedings.

Other stigmas I think come from other factors. Caramel albinos do have a kinking problem. I think they're lovely and I do own a male caramel, but it's undeniable that they do sometimes come out with kinks. My understanding is that some bloodlines kink more often than others, and it also seems that the "type" of kink varies with clutch, so I am hopeful that it may be possible to breed the trait out. I've also heard not to breed caramel x caramel, which isn't such bad advice, but for a different reason: it appears that caramel females produce, on average, 3:1 slugs:eggs -- which is to say, they are far less fertile than your average ball python. My guess is that perhaps the "don't breed caramel x caramel" advice stems from that fact, but has been reinterpreted (inaccurately) in light of the kinking phenomenon as well.

All that having been said, in chinchillas, I will not breed recessive visual x visual. I work with a recessive gene called sapphire, and sapphires tend to be "weaker" (smaller, lower-quality animal), which I strongly believe is due to inbreeding. Some breeds, species and even color mutations are more negatively impacted by inbreeding than others. I hate making possible hets, so for sapphires I will only breed sapphire x het. The reason is just that it's an easy way to minimize inbreeding.

Perhaps it's just a similar situation with albino (and pastel??) BPs, and they are just highly sensitive to inbreeding ... That just doesn't quite make sense to me, though, since albino BPs have been around forever, and presumably quite extensively outcrossed, and pastels are everywhere, outcrossed to everything and stem from multiple different WC bloodlines. So ... I don't know.

I don't think Tim's idea is a bad one, though. It's pretty much how I'm gearing up the recessive portion of my breeding collection as well. To some degree I think maybe my experiences with chinchillas have ingrained it into my brain that visual x het = best outcome. I can't quite justify it logically for snakes, though -- it's almost a superstitious kind of thing, which isn't very good.

(Crap, this is a tl;dr post, isn't it? Sorry guys.)