Big News Coming Tomorrow!

[pythnsnkmn]

I am trying to figure out why a female desert laying eggs has turned into a 30 page fight. Seems like people would be glad to finally see a good clutch from a desert. Would I chance one of my animals, probably not. The OP paid enough for the animal and knew the risk. I hope the eggs hatch and babies thrive. All the bickering is crazy. Just my 2 cents

[Bruceweb]

I am trying to figure out why a female desert laying eggs has turned into a 30 page fight. Seems like people would be glad to finally see a good clutch from a desert. Would I chance one of my animals, probably not. The OP paid enough for the animal and knew the risk. I hope the eggs hatch and babies thrive. All the bickering is crazy. Just my 2 cents

My thoughts exactly..I have never understood why the project was so harshly trashed in the first place..Desert females producing eggs can only be a good thing, you would think the hobby would be pleased rather than bicker looking for reasons to disbelieve that the animals in question possess the desert gene.

Even if the females continued to have a problem males still make beautiful combo's...Its always went over my head, but maybe I dont look at my females as a commodity..its the only reason that I can see for the demise of the project

[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.

[treeboa]

I wish those with the eggs good luck. I do think this would be a good start, but I have to agree that I won't get excited until It's shown that these would be reproducible results on a much larger scale. If not, it still won't be worth it to breed Desert females, in my opinion. As for people saying they shouldn't be experimenting because of the risk to the female, I don't think people like Robyn or Amir would be condoning the experiments if there was really such a high mortality rate. It seems the most common problem is getting slugs. If you breed any animals, you get some mortality rate, if it concerns us so much we wouldn't take a chance on breeding anything. Just my .02! Hoping this all turns out well!

[rabernet]

I'm temporarily locking the thread down to split out all the nonsense. I have no ETA. It could be a few hours, and it could be later this evening. I have to go to work now, and when I can squeeze it in, I will.

Sent from my Samsung Note II using Tapatalk 2

[rabernet]

I've attempted to clean up the thread while trying to maintain the civil discussions that have ranged from optimism to skepticism.

The thread is now re-opened, and these discussions may continue, as long as the participants remain respectful to each other. Any personal issues that have nothing to do with the topic of this thread, but rather posted to insult one another will be also split from this thread and tossed into the split off thread, which now resides in the Quarantine Room, where you are welcome to squabble at your hearts' content.

I will issue a warning now - that those who insist on continuing the personal insults in this thread, after not one, but three staff members have asked for it to end, may very well be faced with warnings and/or infraction points for blatantly disregarding that request.

Here is a link to the split thread: http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...ng-Eggs-Thread

If you do not have access to the QT Room, and wish to have access, please send a PM to one of the Administrators - their names are in RED.

[Mike41793]

I'm gunna ask a 3rd time now lol... Where did Family Reptiles purchase that desert from? Do they have a receipt like the OP does for theirs? I'm not trying to be pessimistic or perpetual devils advocate, but I'm really not seeing any desert in that snake either.

[Marrissa]

I'm gunna ask a 3rd time now lol... Where did Family Reptiles purchase that desert from? Do they have a receipt like the OP does for theirs? I'm not trying to be pessimistic or perpetual devils advocate, but I'm really not seeing any desert in that snake either.

This is what Family Reptiles posted about sharing this information.

To everyone,
Please be patient. Given the challenges with Deserts we want to ensure that the information we are giving is as accurate and beneficial as possible. The details wil be given in due time, but we feel it necessary to collaborate with the other breeders that have viable eggs from a desert female. The original purpose of my initial post was twofold. One was to make contact with the OP for collaboration and to let him know that someone else also has had a female lay. The other reason was to let everyone else know that there was more than one female that has laid good eggs as well.

The details of who the other breeders are not being shared yet mainly because we do not have their go ahead on giving that info out. Their eggs are a couple of weeks behind ours and I imagine they want to wait and see what happens first. As I mentioned, even with our eggs only having a couple of weeks before they are due, there are no guarantees. As witnessed in this thread there are a wide range of beliefs as to when the announcement of viable Desert eggs should be made. We are somewhere in the middle on this belief.

Efforts are being made to determine if the females have come from a common line, or if temperatures were a factor, or age, or weight, or whatever thing or combination of things may have contributed to the success.

[don15681]

to witchbane and family reptiles, just wanted to thank you for sharing this information. don

[Cross Exotics]

You're very welcome Don. I'm sure Witchbane is odd, but it was an old gamer tag from my PC playing days. Cross Exotics is the company my family and I have started. Sorry for the confusion. ~ Joe.