Big News Coming Tomorrow!

[SaintTawny]

You were making some intelligent head way until you equated the problems laying and forming eggs to a morph.

Oh, yeah, I just picked up a super hypo, enchi, black pastel, cantlayeggs female.

Now, had you said "does stacking more genes on spiders remove the wobble?" I would agree entirely with you. However, you didn't.

You're furthering my argument. For spiders, and desert females, it is a defect associated with the morph; it is not a morph itself.

Apples to oranges, is what you're doing.

I'm just saying that equating the inability to form or lay eggs to a morph such as hypo or anything else is not something you can do. It is not a morph, but a defect associated with a morph.

It's just not sound logic.

Doesn't that also imply that you could somehow create an animal that is not desert at all, or spider at all, and have the issues those two have?

i always thought it strange that as a community, ball pythons folks decided desert females infertile. i understand that up till this point, 100% of breeding attempts failed - but hear me out...

where did stan's desert come from ? where did pete's come from ? some past or present wild and free snakes out there created them. are we to believe in the wilds of ghana only male desert ball pythons exist / existed ?

to create a desert ball python, you need the desert gene. no different than a pastel or a spider. you cannot use non-desert gene snakes to create a desert offspring. the same logic follows for pastels, spiders, etc.

i suppose an argument could be made that, sure desert clutches are made, but in the wilds of africa, the females go about their business and die of egg binding or old age having never created offspring and the males crawl around fertilizing non-desert local gals. but i find that a really diluted argument - somewhere in africa, female deserts that lay viable clutches either exist, or existed. these original animals came from somewhere.

A couple things on the strictly genetic side of this. As was touched on by someone else, gene sequences in every animal have multiple functions. In the skin layers, ATCGblahblah(1) will code for let's say pattern. That same exact sequence gets read in glandular tissue to code for hormone production. If the gene that codes for Desert is also read in reproductive tissue during development in a specific way it can indeed be a reproductive issue exclusive to Desert, since the reverse is also true. There is no "Desert causes repro issues" in this case, it's "Desert IS a repro issue."

It's also possible that the original desert snake, first one to mutate and breed, carried a gene for reproductive issues which was located exactly next to or extremely close to the same mutation that causes the desert pattern/color, in which case it can be practically impossible to separate from the Desert gene because of the way that chromosomes divide during meiosis. They don't just split between every set of genes and randomly re-assort everything, there's a whole field of genetic study about predicting gene proximity.

A third possible scenario, which is what everyone getting hyped for these clutches is hoping for, is that the first however many deserts bred in captivity shared a defect that was reasonably close to but separable from the sequence that causes the desert morph, and we've finally reached a point where we've separated the two out.

As for the spider morph, what I suspect happens there is there's a coding error with the sequence that causes the spider mutation, a repeat or many repeats which causes a hiccup with a protein elsewhere. Variance in the number of repeats can easily explain the variance in wobble. This is also possible with Deserts, in that we could find a variability in reproductive problems, some being worse and others being almost normal, or normal enough to lay at least.

DNA sequencing is really the only way we're ever going to get a definitive answer, but years and years of evidence can come pretty close to certainty. I suspect the repro issues with desert are the same that cause the visual morph, or at least inseparable. That's just my opinion, and I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Last thing, there doesn't necessarily have to be a successfully breeding female desert in the wild to propagate the morph that we've discovered. One male can spread a dominant/codominant trait without having any daughters produce viable eggs. The original desert male breeds a wild type female, has a clutch of 6 eggs, let's say it hatches 1.2 desert and 2.1 normals. Next year, he and his desert son each breed a different normal female, and each one of them has just one other desert son. Now there are 4 male deserts propagating the morph in the wild, despite the fact that none of his desert daughters have produced any offspring. At some point, desert is likely to die out in the wild as they're out-competed by a more rapidly growing population of non-deserts, doubly so if the males have developmental issues like some have suggested, but it doesn't have to happen quickly.