Ball-Python Inbreeding

[Anonymous]

I was wondering what you guys think of breeding a male and a female from the same clutch.
Do you think siblings should be breed to each other?!

What are the negatives of inbreeding BPS?

[Smulkin]

The most notable trait they will exhibit from inbreeding is a noticable lack of eyebrows, really bad teeth, and an inclination to sit on the porch of a shack and play "Dueling Banjos" with passing canoers/rafters.


Kidding.


Often proving-out a trait will require breeding back to one of the parents. Successive generations of snakes should not be inbred IMO though - although evidence suggests snakes do not suffer near the same detrimental effects of inbreeding as do humans. I think most breeders try to at least make an effort to avoid a lot of inbreeding in general. Any breeders wanna weigh in here?


(EDIT - man i hate ergonomic keyboards ()

[Bambi]

The most notable trait they will exhibit from inbreeding is a noticable lack of eyebrows, really bad teeth, and an inclination to sit on the porch of a shack and play "Dueling Banjos" with passing canoers/rafters.


Kidding.

OMG, you had me laughing out loud on that one!

[mlededee]

yeah i think we can all tell that you are from west virginia after reading that answer. you must see that a lot up there... :shock: :wink:

[The_Godfather]

I hear that inbreeding is usually harmless, but people over do it to get results with morphs.

For example.... You get a new rare morph. You breed it to a normal, get hets. Then you breed back the females to the daddy and get some morphs. Breed those together for more morphs. Sell off the hets, then the buyers to some inbreeding. And 10 years down the line, you see the problems poppin up all over the place.

I'm not expert on the causes, but I know of a few problems it's caused. Blindness in boas, brain damage in texas ratsnakes. This is what I've heard, not sure if it was the inbreeding or the morph really.

It's bad news, we know what it does to humans. Only because we can talk to them, etc, to find out whats wrong. I bet a lotta symptoms go unseen, only the worst are shown. We never can be sure.


Smulkin made me pee my pants!!

[green_man]

(EDIT - man i hate ergonomic keyboards ()

Your crazy.....

[Smulkin]

I really would like to know if there have been any (long term) studies on possible physiological/neurological effects of successive inbreeding - or whether it is viewed as a moot point in the face of top $ morphs as a source of revenue.


PS Don't make a West Virginian correct your grammar, child . . . even though I was born in Japan Besides this state sports some of the most beautiful women I have laid eyes on. "Dueling banjos" was a reference to "DELIVERANCE: A Love Story starring Burt Reynolds". After having lived in huge cities all my life you couldn't pay me to leave here . . . unless it was maybe 7-figures hehe. Seriously these keyboards DO rack up a TON of misspellings for me though - and so I have to go back and clean up posts every now and again. I reckon. Sorry to hijack the post, Blink - downright rude of me.

[mlededee]

sorry smulkin i couldn't resist. i grew up in the mountains of northen virginia about 30 minutes away from the WV line (so of course everyone there made wv jokes all the time). we actually used to go to the mountains in wv for vacation and go hiking and stuff. it is really beautiful, but i'm too spoiled by the southern sun now to move back to the snowy winters up there. 8)

[hhw]

Well, I don't know much about ball pythons, but Ridgetail Monitors i.e. Ackies (Varanus Acanthurus) were only ever imported in very small numbers so pretty much every specimen you find in captivity today is almost certainly bound to be inbred several times over, with no ill effects to date. I would assume that pythons, which are rather primitive, would be even less prone to ill effects from inbreeding.

Personally, I think you should outbreed when it's feasible. If you're working with hets with a recessive gene, breeding the father to the daughter to get the morph isn't altogether unreasonable. However, you should have bred the father to multiple females for that first generation. That way, he will have daughters from multiple mothers. Then, you can take the offspring from the different daughters and breed them together. Or, even better, you can prove out the male offspring from one daughter to the female offspring of the daughter from a different mother. This probably sounds pretty confusing... the idea is, you dilute the blood as much as you can while proving out the morph as quickly as possible. It's a bit easier with a codominant gene, as the offspring will be visibly different and thus you can just breed first generation offspring with different mothers together. However, to get the homozygous form of the codominant gene you should probably start off with 4 normal females with your original male. Then, you will still be able to produce the homozygous form with parents with different mothers.

[green_man]

Im going to have banjos playing throught my head all day now...
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