Corn Snake morphs with known health issues?

Hello, I’ve tried to do some research on my own but haven’t found much. I’m looking for solid info about what corn snake morphs tend to have more health issues than the rest. If someone knows where to find a honest verifiable list, that would be wonderful! Thank you in advance!

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At this point, most of the morphs have been very outcrossed, so there aren’t any significant problems that always appear in specific morphs. That being said, lavender has a slightly higher chance of kinks. Sunkissed is where stargazer first appeared, although that was proven to be a typical recessive gene, so it’s not common at all. Palmetto is prone to bug eyes.

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Thank you so much for the info! I was thinking about breeding a couple of my noods but was concerned about issues. From what you say there isn’t really a very high chance of this as an issue?

Yeah, it’s not something I would worry about. I mean, if your snake has an obvious defect, then don’t breed it, but if they’re healthy, they should be be able to produce issue-free offspring. What morphs are they?

Halo snow, a cinder possible (hurricane) a buf and I really want a caramel or a topaz in the near future :heart_eyes: I love yellow! But they are all still kinda young but ya gotta plan ahead! Also I followed your Facebook page :wink:

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I love the yellows too! My first corn was an amel, but once I started learning about the morphs available, I knew I needed a yellow one, so my second snake was a gorgeous butter stripe. Nowadays I’m really fond of cinder combos, so that’s what I’m primarily focusing on. And thank you so much for following my page! :heart:

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So are reds not really an issue? I used to think the blood red gene was an issue?

I heard one person mention that recently, but it’s not something I’ve ever seen personally in my bloodred breedings or heard of with other breeders. I’m not sure where that started, seems like an unfounded rumor. Bloodred/diffused is one of the older morphs, so if it had issues to begin with, surely we would have noticed by now and worked on eliminating them from the gene pool.

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I have some caramel tesseras, Bill and Melinda Gates, they are starting to color up nicely, I adore them. I don’t know what it is about the caramel gene, but I dig it! I can’t wait to produce some butter super-tesseras. Now I said it, I better get some pics.

The original bloodreds tended to lay slightly higher numbers of smaller eggs, sometimes they had some puny little hatchlings that were fussy eaters. Those days are long gone. They’ve been outcrossed enough it hasn’t been a real issue for several generations.

(post consolidated @solarserpents)

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The only one with issues right now are Lavenders. They are prone to kinks and not surviving out of the egg.

I used to breed Lavenders, years ago, and didn’t have much trouble with them, but the eggs from my new Lavender girl are small. A couple of them have failed, halfway through incubation. I hope they turn out okay. Do you have any more information about this? I’m not sure we can say it is the Lavender gene itself, can we? Because, again, I never had a problem any problem with them compared to any other corn snakes. That was 12-13 years ago, maybe it has since been measured in somehow and it is a fact, but I’m utterly unaware of any problem with the Lavender gene itself, would you please enlighten me @quirkycorns ?

@jeremyjacob I remember 2 or 3 breeders on a FB page that bred Lavender talking about kinks and that the eggs would die or not form completely. If I come up on their conversation or any article I will post it here.

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Im back @jeremyjacob . This is info from a good friend of mine and a great corn snake breeder. I asked about kinks, dying in egg and or not forming. He said “Yes it is an incubation thing. Most incubate around 82 to get roughly a 60 day incubation time. This quicker development leads to kinks in Lavender based. Though even with a cooler time it’s not always guaranteed there won’t be any that aren’t linked, but it reduces the odds. I had quite a few Lavender based clutches this year so I am not actually incubating anything. Just room temp. Gets about 79-80 in the day and 75-76 at night. I’m on day 76 on incubation time for the first clutch. !
You also have better chances at bigger healthier babies that were allowed to develop at a slower rate with incubation. Not to mention in Kathy’s book it mentions how extremely low temps can even drastically change the overall color and look of the snake.” I hope that helps :slight_smile:

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Thank you so much for taking the time to reply, I appreciate you, and your friend, but I am unconvinced that this has anything to do with the Lavender gene, specifically.

I’ve incubated eggs at a lot of different temps and using a lot of different methods, and I’ve had them come out with and without kinks in widely varying circumstances. High temperatures do increase the occurrence of kinks. Those dangerous temps in my experience (Disclaimer/specificity: This is for most of the North American colubrids in the lampropeltini tribe, of which corns are a part) run closer to 86º F or above for long periods of time, 12 hours or more but especially for days at a time. The specific stage of development is also a factor, early-term heat spikes seem to be more dangerous than later-term heat spikes. I’m not real comfortable with 85º for incubating corn snakes, but I have hatched a whole lot of healthy corn snakes at 84º Fahrenheit. These days 82º F is my go to, and I’ve hatched a lot of different healthy colubrids at that temperature, including hundreds and hundreds of corn snakes. In the 2006 season I hatched almost 350 colubrids, the vast majority were corn snakes, and all were incubated between 82-84.

The condition and size of the eggs when they are laid is by far the best indicator of vigorous offspring in my experience. I have never had a problem with kinking at 82º. I recently hatched a clutch of corns at a somewhat varied temp of 83º to 84º, they are flawless and all eating frozen thawed pinks right out of the gate.

I really appreciate the effort and information, and I will keep it in mind if these het lavender neonates are not viable, but this specific clutch just never looked great. She’s also a new breeder, was a little overweight when I got her, and virgin clutches aren’t always the best. Keep in mind that I’ve produced somewhere near 100 visual lavender corn snakes, I’ve seen 2 of them with a kink in the tail, and another that was, sadly, totally deformed. Those eggs were all from a single clutch exposed to temps near 88-90º. Their siblings hatched in perfect health.

Sometimes the “on a shelf” method doesn’t work in your favor, such as during some of the unprecedented heat waves we’ve had here in the west. Measuring incubation conditions actively, with multiple instruments, is the only way to have much certainty about what temp range your shelf is running at. You must be keeping track of that, you had pretty clear ranges listed. It’s really nice that network enabled hygrometer thermometer devices, bluetooth, wifi, whatever, are all very inexpensive these days. I have them all over the place!

I like the simplicity of the shelf method, but I like the control of an incubator. They both work fine.

As of today, my incubator setup consistently has a total variance of +/-0.3º F, it runs between 81.8 and 82.4 at all times. I turned it down after clutch #1 this year and it became much more stable. It’s a diy incubator I made out of an old 40 gallon aquarium, a cheap controller from Amazon, some mylar bubble insulation from Home Depot and a 150 watt heat cable, with the help of some aluminum duct tape. Works a charm.

There is something to what you’re saying, but I think there are some conclusions being drawn that are a bit premature. Causation seems uncertain at best. I don’t mean for you to take that personally, and I reserve the right to be wrong. Lavenders, or certain lines of them, may be especially prone to kinking at mild temperatures like 82º F, but I don’t see any meaningful data to support that assertion. My personal anecdata (anecdotes based on memories of my own breeding records that I probably still have laying around somewhere) indicates they (lavenders) kink at the same rate and for the same reasons as any other corn snake.

When I run into kinks I cull the deformed animals. (It ain’t pretty, but that’s snake ranching for ya.) If it happened at normal temperature ranges I try to split that pair up and breed each of them to other proven breeders who have healthy offspring. If either or both of those clutches have kinked babies I do not breed the animals that throw kinks any longer. I only had one animal with that problem and gave it away as a pet to folks who don’t have any interest in ever breeding snakes.

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This is an interesting topic that I have been working on trying to research more. Also the info about the incubation temps is interesting.

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This is wonderful insight, if I ever get into corns

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