Quality of breeding stock

[dave partington]

Hi, my name is dave. I thought I should make my username my real name so there would be no way to hide when the townsfolk come out with the torches & gear at midnight looking for me. I saw a link to this thread posted by Pro Exotics on the facebook and thought, "Hey, it's almost as much drama as cornsnakes.com, but not quite". I'm a cornsnake guy. Don't have a BP yet, so I'm dissable. Got about 600 of the wriggly corns, and a fair grasp on the genetics vortex. Keep looking at these BPs out of the corner of my good eye at expos, online, all the familiar places. Some of them stop me in my tracks.

Reading through all this thread, there's a few words which leap off the page at me like a hungry chigger in a dry swamp. So I thought, "Hey, I'll get a username, and post some pot-stirring words of dumbdom". Please keep in mind I'm just learning new terms about things like "double hets" and "Killer Bees" and "Bloody Pangolins" and morph names. So some of the morph names might not be quite accurate, but hey, I'm learnable. And sometimes delusional. I hope I'll fit in here. Okay okay I'll get on with it.

(I understand there are a handful of "ugly" snakes that throw great babies, these are not the rule)

Cherry picked this single sentence out of the post which started this thread.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and wildly assume the little I know about genetics in one Genus of snakes can be applied to snakes of another Genus. There are probably not enough "ugly" snakes (Assuming you mean "classics" or "normal" or "non-homozygous for recessive traits/gene combos" when you refer to "ugly" snakes).

"Incromulents" are the morph-name I am using for this post. I suspect they do not exist yet in the trade. Hope springs eternal & all that stuff. Perhaps(?) "ugly" snakes are necessary for producing healthy morphs/?. I often see persons acquiring a 1.1, 1.2, etc, of future breeding stock from an individual producer, with no knowledge of if they are F1, F2, F5, F293... with the goal of breeding them together to produce more of the same morph. If one can acquire unrelated stock for breeding them to the first year they are ready to breed, and produce some "holdbacks", this is a good way of getting 50% unrelated blood/genetics into the breeding program. By "unrelated", I do not mean simply buying some Incromulents from another table at the expo, but asking lots of questions, to make sure the stock has been out-crossed and brought back through a couple of generations. There seems to be some kind of urgency to get back one's investment as fast as possible before there are ten thousand producers of Incromulents and the market crashes. So okay, you got a clutch of baby Incromulents and they all roll over on their backs when they swallow the FT meals, and that's cute to watch so it's a marketing advantage, and they're all chimney red and Halloween orange and they do some other jigglemaster tricks as well, but focusing on the color makes them better then the Incromulents on someone else's table at the expo. Plus, they're funner to watch. Heck, I'm ready to shell out 9K for one right now!

Running with scissors. Does anyone "Line Breed" BPs? This does not mean breeding babies to babies from an original 1.1 for several generations.
So you find the perfect high color/pattern/recessive-genetics-&/or-traits male, he is everything you want him to be.
Then you find three UNrelated females from three OTHER sources which are WHOLLY unrelated to each other, unrelated to the male.
(One could use 4 or more other females, depending on how far down the road you want to go with BPs into many years into the future. There are many variables to look at during this original nexus of making a decades long decision around the goals of one's breeding program; the three females may well be three different high color recessive genetics [genes or traits] morphs).
Breed the male to each of the three females.
Holdback ALL.
Label them! G1 = Giving the offspring of female#1 the designation of "G1". Do not discard the extra males, you never know if an "ugly" male is going to toss out awesome babies.
Group 1 (G1)
Group 2 (G2)
Group 3 (G3)

Keep the 3 groups separate. This is imperative.


Raise up G1 and breed F1 X F1; hold back targets.
Raise targets up, breed F2 X F, raise up, repeat: F3 X F3.


Do the above steps with G2 and G3.


Hitting F4 & F5:
G1, G2, and G3 are only 50% related, because they came from different mothers.
G1-F3 X G2-F3. = F4. Holdback, group. Repeat. F4 X F4 = F5.


F5 from G1 X G2. Breed these into G3. Has your cerebral cortex imploded yet?


By doing so, you are interlacing the genetics through several line-bred generations, so when you out-cross in F7 or F8 X a new wild-collected or otherwise un-related BP, genetics of the target are so thickly interlaced, that one should get back around 35-50% Target in the F2. So the Target, whether caused by a gene, set of genes, or genetics-- in this instance appears to behave like a gene, when in fact, there may be no specific gene causing the visual phenotype. Hence, Incromulents "appear to be a gene" but in fact they are simply a line-bred morph.

There are other ways to look at a lot of these high-color line-bred morphs, that is, that het genes can influence the visual color of a morph. Different het genes can change the visual appearance of an individual critter. Only by working with them for several generations will this become apparent.

Of course you'll get some odd stuff to leave at the local petshop along the way, and then forum people will call it "sub-standard" stuff. but to protect one's own personal vestment, sometimes it is necessary to leave some "ugly" snakes at the petshop, rather then listing them with all the hets, to try to get ten dollars more for them in the short-term.

Hope this wasn't a waste of otherwise good space. Special thanks to Pro Exotics. Man o man, I gotter git me some BPs.
Thanks for sharing.
Cheers, dp. it's like a dyslexic bp, dp is.