Leopards

[Mrl249]

This is our little leopard man

He will be paired to our het pied, lemon blast, spider, pastel, and pastel lesser and a couple of others

[C&H Exotic Morphs]

If they are all het pied , does leopard to leopard create pieds. Or do they have to be bred to a homozygous pied to produce more pieds ?

Leopard x Leopard will produce Super Leopards which are Pied.
And Leopard x Pied will produce Leopard Pieds.

[Pythonfriend]

Leopard is basically an advanced version of pied.

Pied is incomplete dominant or recessive, some people say they see het pied markers consistently in 100% het pieds, other people say that often it cannot be seen. So, if we say people cannot tell het pieds from normals, its recessive.

Leopard is incomplete dominant, one copy of the gene will show quite clearly. And the homozygous form is a pied.

Both genes are fully compatible and sit on the same locus. That gives us 3 ways to produce a visual pied BP:
- Super leopard
- Leopard + Het pied combo
- Piebald / "super het pied"

All of these look similar, well, they look like a piebald. And any ball python can only in total have two copies of either of the genes, 2x leopard or 1x leopard + 1x het pied or 2x het pied. Just like it is with the BEL complex or the ivory/puma/highway complex.


It should be obvious why the prices are so high, many people working with piebalds would like to upgrade to leopard. A pied male makes pieds and 100% het pieds. A leopard pied makes either pieds (when bred to a pied) or will make 50% leopards 50% het pieds (when bred to a normal or anything else). A super leopard makes either pieds (when bred to a pied, or leopard pied, or super leopard), or all offspring will get the leopard gene (when bred to anything else).


The gene quite frankly appears to be in all regards superior to pied / het pied. The only thing to check would be possible genetic problems with the super leopard, but so far nothing came up.

Anyway, world of ball pythons is wrong to label it dominant, it is either incomplete dominant (called codominant by us) with a totally lethal super form (highly unlikely because people appear to have nice super leopard animals that look like piebalds), or its incomplete dominant (called codominant by us) with a super-form looking just like a piebald. World of ball pythons has known problems when it comes to gene complexes. For example, they list the toffino as "Recessive: Albino, Recessive: Toffee" while it is not a double recessive, you get the visual form of the toffino whenever you get a "het toffee het albino". And more than 2 copies of genes of Albino/Toffee/Candy is impossible, while WOBP suggests the Toffino has 2 copies of the albino gene and 2 copies of the toffee gene.

So dont trust WOBP on this one. Gene complexes are the weak spot of WOBP. To make sure the one thing where i am only 95% certain, research the optics and health of super leopards.

[TKR]

I just hatched out a nice little leopard girl

[bcr229]

Wow, just saw a leopard mohave combo on Fauna, those are sweet! Time to throw some more cash into the snake savings account.

[Eric Alan]

Why are they so expensive? I fell in love after seeing the leopard pinstripe and went looking on fauna to check out prices and see what was out there. I was shocked to see them regularly over 1300 for males, females (what I want) obviously more. Is this a relatively new morph? I was expecting 300-600 since it's a dominant morph.

Apparently all you need to do is wait a few days for prices to drop. There's a 2013 male being offered by Bill Galloway at Loxahatchee Herp Hatchery for $700 which includes free shipping and a $200 credit with Loxahatchee Rodents. I'd be seriously thinking about picking him up if I needed a male right now.

[Pythonfriend]

prices on the single-gene leopard can come down quite quickly since its a codom.

but prices for super leopard, and the leopard + het pied combo, will always and forever stay above the prices for regular piebald.

given the popularity of piebald and that its basically a new and improved version of piebald, i say this gene has a lot of future potential, even if the prices for single-gene leopards come down.

[cory9oh4]

This is our little leopard man

He will be paired to our het pied, lemon blast, spider, pastel, and pastel lesser and a couple of others

You, sir, have made me jealous!!! Very nice!

[Mrl249]

You, sir, have made me jealous!!! Very nice!

Why, thank you🍻