Quote Originally Posted by RandyRemington View Post
While I think selective breeding and paying attention to lines is a great first practice I think there may be some cases where environment also plays a big part.

Spinning in spiders and kinking (and perhaps even female fertility) in caramels might be issues that are inherent tendencies of the mutation that can not be breed out. However, particularly with the caramel kinking I have reports from respected breeders I trust of long stretches of no kink babies that would be astronomically unlikely based on the kink rates reported by other breeders. If it was just selective breeding I would expect the customers of these breeders to report the same good results and we would have known non kinking caramel lines. Perhaps why I've not seen new reports of kinkless caramel lines is that something else, perhaps even accidental, in the feeding or environment is compensating for the caramels kinking tendency in some collections. One theory I had was some nutrient either not tolerated or needed in higher rates by the caramel mutation.

Anyway, back to cinnamon/black pastel. What if a tendency to duck bill and kink are just part of the mutation just like the color and pattern we like. Two copies of the gene make these weaker traits more likely to show but there is also the possibility for an environmental factor to help suppress the tendency. Maybe incubating at one end or the other of the normal temperature range can increase your chances of producing a perfect super and the other extreme a duckbilled kinked regular (heterozygous) cinnamon/black pastel? I'm not saying the breeder who produced the duck billed black pastels or anyone who produced kinked caramels is not keeping their animals perfectly fine as far as excepted practices for ball pythons in general, it just might be that these mutations might need something a little different.
this is a great point. I would love to see a study done on two clutches from a reliable cinny or black pastel line with temps as the only difference in incubation practice. I think it could yield interesting results and provide keepers with a reliable control for working with the genes.

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