After more than five years of working on it I hatched a perfectly healthy panda pied a few days ago. The same clutch also yielded a perfectly healthy super black pastel. For me this puts to bed many years of wondering whether or not I was going to be able to produce one that was healthy.
For a long time I asked the "where are the pandas" question, too. The reality is that, until recently, very few female black pastel het pieds have ever been sold so the only real way to get one was to make it yourself. It wasn't until last year that I hatched my first visual black pastel pieds and they are only now breeder size. This means that almost everybody choosing to get into the project has been starting mostly from [female] scratch, raising their own animals and then doing black pastel het pied x black pastel het pied pairings (like I did). Those 1:16 odds are very long. This has been a very elusive snake because it is very hard to hit on such long odds.
Ian Gniazdowski produced the first panda pied in 2008. To my knowledge the animal I hatched earlier this week is #2 (black pastel, not cinnamon). I fully expect that we will see more in the coming weeks. The original panda that Ian produced is the animal that is now in the collection of Michael Cole (last I heard, at least). That animal was and is spectacular and set a lot of people in motion on the project. I know I quadrupled my efforts after seeing that animal. I'm not sure where the suggestion that that snake was not a panda came from; having seen that animal in person and knowing a little bit about its lineage there is no reason to think that it is anything else. My best guess is that some people enjoy being speculative nay-sayers on such things.
I'll post a picture of the snake after it sheds.
Best,
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