Inbreeding question?

[kk1020man]

Im new to BP, just got a male 50% het for piebald, and a very nice light colored female normal. I have been looking around and have noticed that many breeders, use offspring to mate with their parents or siblings. Is there any side affects, or any health problems with this? I know in other animals it is bad, and health and mental problems occur. Just a thought. I didn't see any other posts with this question. Thank you....

[Nate]

Well I believe that a ball pythons genetics are so simple that line breeding doesn't pose a risk. A lot of new morphs are discovered by breeding offspring back to parents, and, to my knowledge, the most popular morphs out there are results of line breeding and have no genetic health problems. That's not to say it does not exist.

[kk1020man]

Yeah I was just thinking about when a new morph is produced and it is the only one, does it have to be inbreed to form another morph of that same type? Or the same type of BP's can be used to try to produce the same outcome, and not necessarily the same mother and father. Just my mind being bored and trying to think a little.

[pankthesnake]

I was always led to believe that two siblings SHOULD be safe to breed together as long as there are no deformities visible on either one.

The great thing about co-dom genes is that they don't need to be line bred, unless you want to produce supers and even then there are enough people producing them that its easy to sell yours and pick up an unrelated one.

[elevatethis]

Something to think about is this...how many years have all the morphs been bred? For a lot of morphs, I'd guess that there's less than 5 generations for the vast majority of them. So, all morphs of the same kind, to some degree, are probably VERY closely related, being seperated by only a few degrees.