Quote Originally Posted by reptidude1 View Post
ive been breeding ball pythons for 3 years and ive had them as pets for 4-5 years. I wanted to know if anyone had some really good information on breeding carpets because id like to get into them too. Ive had a coastal carpet as pet for a while and id like to get more into them. One question i could not find. Can you breed different subspecies of carpets (such as costal x jungle) or only coastal x coastal? Also lets say i were to breed a coastal jaguar x a coastal tiger or a coastal jaguar x a jungle carpet. Is it like BPs were you get 50/50, mixed snakes or something different. Thanks alot for help in advance and i plan on doing some more research before i fully get into this stuff. Thanks guys.
1) What is a good resource on breeding carpet pythons?
- The complete carpet python by nick mutton, justin julander, and ben morrill. I cannot recommend this book enough!

2) Can you breed different subspecies?
- yes you can. Some breedings are subspecies specific, maintaining subspecies purity is a popular project. Other breedings specifically cross subspecies to get the benefits that both subspecies may have. Like anything else, there are people who may consider crossing subspecies a bad idea. Popular crosses are morph crosses (jungle jaguars from a jungle x coastal pairing, for example), or just regular crosses, such as Diamond Jungles. A popular project is taking a 50% diamond jungle (aka the offspring from a diamond bred to a jungle, or a 50% DJ bred to another 50% DJ), and breeding it back to a pure diamond to produce what are known as 75% DJs.. and then crossing those 75%ers to each other to produce F2 75% DJ.

3) When you cross subspecies, we name them by the % or fraction that each subspecies donates to its lineage.. much like you might be 1/2 Finnish, 1/4 german, 1/8 cherokee, and 1/8 French. Typical recessive/dominant/incomplete dominant traits act exactly as they do in ball pythons.. Heterozygotes of a particular morph contribute their allele 50% of the time, and homozygotes contribute their allele 100% of the time. the jaguar morph for example is an incomplete dominant trait where homozygotes die in the egg prior to hatching. The tiger trait is tricky because it's shown to be a bit polygenetic, while it used to falsely be thought that it behaved as a typical incomplete dominant trait. The tiger trait is a discussion unto itself.

If you are really interested in carpets, I highly recommend the moreliapythons.com forum. Many of us bp.net-ers are members there, and there are also some guys over there that aren't members here, but have really helpful information on successful carpet python husbandry. There is some really great reading material over there.