Do you see anything more than Pied?

Pythons Ball Pythons
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Thank you! He does look so much better just in a months time. But when I got him I was feeding him every 5 days and now that he is over 100 grams I moved him to every 7 so it didnt take him long to start putting on the weight. He hasn’t ever refused once.

I am definitely seeing that pieds come with such a variety. I honestly dont know how anyone can tell if there ar other genes. Its just his vibrant orange was throwing me off.

If I ever decide to breed, I might do a panel, just so I would know the for sure genes and what I should pair him with.

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14

@rachaell You know that saying “you can’t have just 1”? Well…totally applies :laughing: And Allie and Guy are a great-looking duo as well! How cool of Wilbanks to let you keep Allie!
And this community is kind of like the opposite of Facebook. You’ll not have people acting crappy or rude here. For me, it’s so nice to feel comfortable to ask questions, even if I think they might be dumb. Because everyone here understands and practices respect, you won’t be ridiculed. Also, the increasingly uncommon idea of agreeing to disagree is actually alive and well here, as it should be. This is my only social media, and I love it. Hope to see more posts from you in the future! :snake:

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15

If you want, it won’t hurt to feed him every 5 days until 300 grams and then move him to 7.
That’s what I do for all of my hatchlings. :slight_smile:

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16

5 or 7 days will work for a while. You could keep this going until you start seeing some skipped meals. At that point I would switch to a 14 day feedings schedule. As they get older, most tend to eat less often. Trying to keep a 7 day feeding (when older) is where most people start saying “they have a picky eater”. You are definitely on the right path.

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You are SO right about older Bps and 7 day feedings! I made that mistake with mine for years until I found this forum and the light bulb came on! After some some help here with an older female of mine that had quit eating because I was feeding her, or trying to feed her every 7 days! Now she eats every time only not as often!! :+1::clap::blush:

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18

He was so tiny when I was feedings him every 5 days I swear I could see little rat lumps throughout his body like the snake game with the apples lol. And he pooped a lot! Way more then my other two ever did in a short amount of time. So I was thinking moving him to 7 days would hopefully help get him more regular.

My other two snakes I fed every 7 until about 700 grams and then moved them to 10-11 days. My male is extremely shy and sometimes picky and will skip a meal once in a while, but my female will always eat. She would def eat every 7 if I let her lol but she just now weighed over 1000 grams, so im thinking about moving her to 14 days now so she doesn’t become overweight. Which she will not be happy about. Haha

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19

Thank you for saying that! I don’t want to hijack the thread, but I was struggling to get Noodle to eat at first, and the feeders I got were a little small so we are on every 4 days. Now that I’m out of that size and moving up I thought I’d go to once a week, but he’s only like 112g, so I’ll go to every five for now. Thank you.

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Just FYI, since they are both so similar, both het clown and their ID numbers were only one number off - they are probably clutchmates. While you can breed full siblings, and there are times when you have to to get the result you’re looking for, for a morph as relatively common as clown, I wouldn’t.

I have some Wilbanks snakes (probably too many, lol, but they’re so beautiful and I totally cave when they do a sale) and their customer service is, as you’ve found, amazing! So if you ask them if your snakes are clutchmates, they’ll tell you.

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21

Awesome snakes, and how cool you got a 2 for 1 from willbanks. Those 2 will make really cool super pastel butter enchi clowns! Very beautiful pied. I have a male piec het lavender named October. Pied with 1 gene can be almost all white to high pattern so can get hard to identify

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Sounds like you are on the right track. I would keep doing what you think is right. They are all different, so you just can’t go by what one person says. I have always started out every 5 to 7 days. Then when they start to refuse to to eat, I move to 14 days. You may be feeding on different schedules, as they are all different. But you could have a 1 week and 2 week same day schedule that does not change, so it is easier on you to keep track of. At some point it will all turn into 2 week. You might even find that some will be 3 weeks. They can go a long time without food, so never panic when this starts to happen. My longest one went off food for 1 year. Then had 4 meals, then stopped again. He is an odd one, not typical eater at all.

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23

There has never been health problems with brother sister, mother son, father daughter, and even grandparents with grandkid paring. They are not like humans. Most don’t talk about it, but this happens all the time, for many different reasons. If there was health issues, it would be all over the industry with proof of the outcomes. Just like spider, banda pieds, and so on. I would not just keep paring them and then their offspring together over and over again. But that is me. I don’t what to be the one finding new info and be stuck with keeping things I can’t sell or have to put down all the time.

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I don’t know that this is a valid statement. You can’t claim there has never been issues. Some people are totally against it, while some pair siblings/parents/etc. you’re weakening your genetic diversity, and setting it up for problems to be there regardless.

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25

My friend and I had the inbreeding/linebreeding conversation the other day. My fried happened to have the coversation with another rattlesnake breeder about the topic. He was told that another rattlesnake guy tested it; he bred a pair, bred sibling offspring from that pair, bred siblings again… it took nine generations of sibling to sibling breeding before he got a deformity. Pretty sure no one will be doing that kind of breeding, but for educational value, there you go.
Also, I read that in labs they inbred rats for 40 generations before they had issues.

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That is interesting. And one defect, could have been a different cause. Still, that is a long line before ever seeing a problem.

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I already know they are not clutch mates. They told me what their parents are and they have 2 different hatch dates. But I also would have thought the same with there numbers being so close, if I hadn’t already known better.

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28

So, this is actually something I studied. A lot.
Rodents in the wild, particularly mice, inbreed very regularly. How laboratory strains of mice are created are actually by doing brother/sister pairings, after 20 generations, the mice are genetic clones of each other, giving you identical mouse after identical mouse to study - there are no variables in the strain, there are only the variables you introduce.

Does this mean the mice are healthy? No.
It means if you want to study mice who will ALL get a certain type of cancer at 3 months old and see if diet or another environmental factor can push that back to 4 months, you can.
If you want to test drugs to treat diabetes, there are strains of mice who are guaranteed to develop diabetes.

Can you take any mouse litter and get 20 generations and have them all be clones of each other? No again, plenty of developing strains fail before they get to that point because you’re locking in too many issues

So basically, while yes, it can be done … sometimes. And it can even, occasionally, be done indefinitely, you are far from being guaranteed any sort of healthy result. Linebreeding, carefully used, is an excellent tool for locking in good traits. But without some serious long-term commitment and a LOT of knowledge, you’re very likely to lock in bad traits as well; color you can see at hatch, a greatly increased susceptibility to mites or a strong tendency to develop digestive issues before they’re 10 is nowhere near as visible, but you don’t know you haven’t locked that down even tighter than the color.

Jackson Labs is the premier reference to study such things, they even offer a course; Common Laboratory Mouse Strains: A Beginner's Guide

And here you can see some commonly available strains with their strengths and weaknesses listed; https://www.research.uky.edu/uploads/commonly-used-mouse-strains

So anyway, hope no one minds the thread drift too much, it’s just, I really do study genetics a lot, I breed and care for a LOT of animals, I’ve carefully linebred some animals pretty tightly, I’ve got a couple of horses with only 1 grandpa so, while my opinion is only my opinion, it’s a pretty educated opinion, and I’m going to stick with “for something as common as a simple recessive you can buy easily, don’t breed brother and sister.”

:wink: Not that it sounds like rachaell has that scenario anyway

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Just going to drop some links to other convos here. We’re getting a bit off topic, I know, but I feel it’s important to not just let comments about inbreeding being a good idea/not a problem at all be left without being addressed.

We have two members of the community who work heavily with genetics, and have explained the in depths of this in these threads. Comments from @t_h_wyman and @chesterhf are ones I’m specifically referring to.

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30

You definitely cannot make this claim. The reason consanguineous pairings are risky is because it concentrates rare/deleterious varients.

Say you buy a male snake that has a really cool phenotype, breed it as a dinker project, and hold back a few of the offspring to either pair back to the dad or to each other to try and isolate a morph. Maybe this snake also carries a variant that is either rare in the population, or de novo and is fine in the heterozygous form, but is lethal or causes a defect in the homozygous form. You pair this snake, the offpspring seem healthy (because you outcrossed), but now some of those offspring also now carry this varient. If you continued outcrossing, you’d likely never have an issue because the variant is rare in the population, and the liklihood of pairing to another snake with it is slim to none. But you now decide to pair a daughter back to dad. They both have this variant. The result is ~1/4 of the offspring maybe down’t develop/hatch, or don’t have eyes, or have kinking, pick a phenotype of your choice. Like many ball python breeders, you call it an in incubator fluctuation/malfunction, and mainly dismiss it because the parents are healthy and you’ve never had this an issue before, and it gets dismissed and moved on.

Undoubtedly things like this happen all the time. I have yet to see a ball python breeder make pedigrees to track defects, and certainly nobody is doing trio sequencing anytime an unhealthy or defective animal is born.

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I am not saying to do it and nothing will happen. I am saying it is happening and you don’t hear anything bad from it. Are the problems you listed from doing this? or a one off or even incubator problems, it is possible. But breeders do this to get certain data or certain morphs or just to confirm what they have. For someone to do this as a one off, would not be the end of the world or create some unrecognizable creatures. Now Pairing known problem morphs together would definitely not be advertised. So doing your homework to know what you have and what can happen, is a must. But two normal or two pastel from the same parents, would not be an issue. Big breeders do this and even admit to doing it. And if they have not found a link to something horrible happening, then if someone that starts out does it, it can’t be any worse.

Everyone will have their one take on this and for their own reason. But there is no data out there that states to never do it. The advice I gave was just that, advice. Some will like it some won’t. I have not done it, but that does not mean I won’t. Given the right reason to do it, I will. I am not against it nor am I pushing to do it. Just answering the question, “can it be done” , yes and it is being done, without issues being reported. This from many big breeders.

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To pitch in with a point I rarely see brought up within reptile breeding circles – inbreeding can lock in issues that you won’t see manifest until later in the animal’s life, beyond the point at which the breeder will ever see their produced snake again, and so it can’t be said that inbreeding doesn’t result in issues: it can only be said that, a lot of the time, inbreeding doesn’t result in issues that the breeder sees.

There is another way to think about this: we all know partho clutches suffer and tend to have shortened lifespans, bad breeding results, and health issues. The presumed mechanism for this weakness is a lack of genetic diversity, given that it’s only the dam’s genetics contributing to the clutch. Correct me if I’m wrong – are there other reasons a partho clutch would suffer such defects and deficits? – but if I’m right, partho clutches, and their grim outcomes, can be understood as the most extreme possible example of inbreeding. They will display 100% of whatever recessive or hidden health issues the dam carries.

If inbreeding wasn’t a problem in snakes, partho clutches would be healthy.*

The fact that a lot of breeders do it without issues that they ever see doesn’t mean that inbreeding doesn’t come with risks: it just means that the chances of visible, immediate defects may be relatively low every time you roll those dice. You’re still rolling the dice, and you don’t know what you’re setting your animals up for down the line when they’re older.

*Of course things get interesting when you look at partho-only species like mourning geckos, but the route to any stable-inbred or stable-partho population comes with a HUGE amount of up-front offspring attrition. If a species isn’t already partho-stable or inbred-stable, you would essentially have to keep killing any unhealthy offspring produced until unhealthy offspring stopped being produced, and at that point you’re one bad disease away from total population annihilation.

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