To kick off the New Year, and to support @eaglereptilesgood work, I computed the top 100 ball python genes by quantity that are currently for sale in our market (in the US). These are the same you’d find in the market index, except I’ve combined counts across the different trait types per gene, and add the rank/sort.
Disclaimers:
This is just one way to count the “top 100”
“Normal” aka “wild type” which isn’t really a gene is at rank 57, but in reality would be the most common. It’s just that only ads with no genes get this tag.
The list also contains a few other trait tags which aren’t actually genes (e.g., “Paradox”, “Female Maker”).
Het Red Axanthic is it’s own co-dominant gene. Red Axanthic is the super form of Het Red Axanthic. HRA isn’t Heterozygous someone just named it that way. I believe it is also the same as Green Pastel, but it shouldn’t be removed from the list.
It’s definitely confusing since it doesn’t fit the usual naming convention in the hobby of only calling animals with recessive genes heterozygous, but it is heterozygous.
Just like what we call “Pastel” is a Het Pastel, and what we call a “Super Pastel” is a homozygous Pastel. But since Het Pastel is a visual morph the hobby drops the “het” and we replace the “homozygous” with “super.” Then we usually do pretty much the opposite with recessive traits - keep the “het” but then drop the “homozygous” completely.
I want to say the name HRA was adopted as a band-aid for originally mistaking how the gene worked in the first place which caused the homozygous form to get the name “Red Axanthic.” But someone else probably has a better idea than I do on that.
Thank you for that, that makes sense. (What you said, not the naming system in general… The guys before us balls that up )
This is why I’m enjoying doing this so much, every single day since starting I have learnt something new.
Such as another thing I came across are “hooks” on Yellowbelly. I’ve looked at hundred of pictures of them over the past few weeks and not until I read a comment on a random post from years back on another forum did I notice the “hooks”… I went back and checked all them pictures again and it seems to pop up a lot in YB. Any thoughts on that?
Here’s examples of what I mean.
Normal "alien heads"
Looks like a alien head, usually 1 or 2 eyes
YB "Hooks"
“Hooked” alien heads with 1 or many eyes
DG "blanks"
Very few eyes if any
I know several morphs show these exact characteristics aswel but it took a years old comment for me to notice it with YB
@eaglereptiles I feel like you’re gathering all this data before you give your master presentation as a prestigious reptile event ha-ha . Love all the things you find and explain - best when you include pics!
To make it even more confusing, there is a video in youtube about het red axanthic in which they claim it is also the same as lace black back, and is almost the same as BHB’s Lori. The last one I never found proof off somewhere else, but if you check world of ball pythons and check lace black back(Amir Solemani) there is written:aka green pastel. Het red axanthic is from Corey Woods.If you check gargoyle you get combination lace black back and black pastel. But if you check for het red axanthic cinnamon there is written: aka gargoyle. I makes me think of the correctness of world of ball pythons because cinnamon and black pastel are really not the same and even don’t look the same. But I think lace black pastel and red het acanthic are like coral glow and banana. Same thing, but different origin. And gargoyle is like panda pied. A panda pied can be made with super black pastel, super cinni or cinni and black pastel. One thing is for shure, they are allelic to black pastel and cinnamon.
Long story but saw on a kind of Graigs list my lesser pinstripe yellowbelly het red axanthic and fell in love. He has a back patern I never saw before and I couldn’t find any other no matter how I searched the internet. Was sold as a lesser yellowbelly but looked nothing alike. After months seeing him I finally mailed the seller. He didn’t know either. He bought him from a British breeder in a expo here in Holland but the paper he got was also not to clear. There was “het red” written on but had no idea what this was. He buys and sells all the time but had very big difficulty of selling him because there was so much confusion about the genes. But by checking the facebook page of the breeder I finally found him with the full description. He claims it is even a world first.There is even a youtube video with the breeder and the dad of mine is in. Virtualy the same minus the yellow belly. So that’s why I really dived in this het red axanthic confusion.
Edit: if anyone is interested in joining the confusion called “het red axanthic” and Green pastel, the youtube video is from K&S exotics posted in juli 2018.
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