Genetic Diversity in a Collection

[OhhWatALoser]

i do believe reptiles to be somewhat more resilient when it comes to inbreeding. Resilient makes it sound like they have this super genome, they just on average have less gene that causes negative traits then more commonly bred things, like dogs and humans.

that doesnt mean that there wont be any negative consequences at all. also doesn't mean there won't be positive.

if a python has a diverse genome, its immune system will have more solutions to deal with disease. so the immune system is weakened by inbreeding. which means the BP looks completely fine, but the risks that it dies from an infection may be a bit elevated. which is something you dont notice at all, until its too late. Unless the homozygous is the solution or the heterozygous is the problem, you can't make a blanket statement like that.

another thing that happens is that fertility goes down, this is more obvious, and i have heared breeders confirm it. if you do a lot of inbreeding (lets say you are working on a triple recessive), after a while you can notice fertility in the project going down. add new blood and it goes back up. and ignore the breeders producing high fertility line bred animals or ignore the volta region ball pythons? Actually I think the volta region ball python are a great example for a few things said in this thread

so i think genetic health is a real issue. and while you can get away with ignoring it for a generation or two, you should not ignore it completely. You are assuming there are gene that produce negative traits in there. If there are none of those genes, how can there be any issues? It is quite simple, pay attention to your pairings, inbred or not. If there are negative traits, you shouldn't even be breeding the first generation, putting a generation number on it just seems silly.