There is no “fix”. This is not something like strep throat where you give them a pill and they get better. This is a second phenotype of the mutation to the gene. To fix it you need to edit the mutation out of the gene, thus rendering the gene back to the WT state and thereby eliminating the pattern/colour phenotype as well.
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I can at least say, they are not hard to sell, actually one of the easier sells. However I’ll respect anyone’s decision not to work with the morph.
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Before I ever thought of breeding I read horror stories and was told not to buy spider. The mod on reddit even told me that if I posted a picture of a snake with spider gene that I just purchased they would ban me.
I just figured that theyre so frowned upon that they would be more difficult to sell.
Now I know better
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There are 1434 Spider Morphs for sale on Morph Market as of right now.
It is a popular gene. Very pretty.
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And 18627 if you look at all 
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Yes, if you go to all. 
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I love spider and don’t see an issue with it. My mimosa (champagne ghost) shows more of a wobble than my spiders do. I have some beautiful combos with it.
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Some of you may have already have read this, I thought it was an interesting essay that this person
wrote about the Spider Gene. Since I am still learning, I do not agree or disagree with Her findings.
It is an interesting read. I always keep an open mind about everything, unless I experience
it myself and now it to be a fact. I have seen all kinds of things throughout my 56 years of life.
Here is the link to the essay:
Bethany Fox - Hypopigmentation and Spider Wobble - Composition II - Science.pdf (cscc.edu)
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From the title alone I can tell you that her conclusions are mistaken as Spiders do not have hypomelanism
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She blames the “ Hypopigmentation” for the spiders neuro problems. This definitely is not a good source of information.
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I think something like this is already posted in this thread but I’m going to post it again because it seems relevant. The main reason spiders are so frowned upon and hated by many uneducated people is because of the propaganda of extremist animal rights groups. This post describes the point of all of this.
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I read the whole thing and nothing that would surprise you at all and her conclusion is easily ripped to shreds. She would need to explain the 50+ examples of reduced pigmentation that do not have any neuro issues and the increased pigmentation that do have issues. That alone shows reduction in pigmentation has nothing to do with neuro issues and anyone researching should know that imo.
Apparently I’m a source tho lol. She doesn’t seem to be updated on my last pairing that produced a living (barely but living) super spider.
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This article makes a few good points, but says nothing we in the hobby didn’t already know. For example:
“The purpose of this essay is to show that the neurological condition known as “Spider wobble”, seen in the Spider morph of Python regius, is likely caused by the same mutated gene that leads to the hypopigmentation, which would mean that the Spider phenotype is pleiotropically linked to the neurological condition and, thus, cannot be separated from it through selective breeding.”
Now I’m not even sure the term “hypopigmentation” applies here. Is the author is referring to hypomelanism, (which spiders clearly aren’t, since that’s a separate gene that has no wobble) or are they using this term to refer to any animals that are lighter than normal? Either way, we already know that we can’t breed the wobble out of spiders through selective breeding. This is nothing new.
“Pleiotropy is when one gene can have multiple, seemingly unrelated, effects on the phenotype… Some hypopigmentation phenotypes are associated with more severe clinical signs than deafness, such as megacolon, eye disorders, and neurological conditions, and may even be lethal.”
I think this statement about Pleiotrophy is relevant too, but again, we already know that the spider morph is what causes the wobble, since normal babies from a spider don’t have it.
If you look beyond the spider at other wobble genes though, it doesn’t follow that hypopigmentation (or areas that are lighter than usual) causes the wobble in all of them. Woma, hidden gene woma, and super sables can all be a medium to darker brown. So there’s little to no hypopigmentation in these snakes, but the pleiotrophic effect (the wobble) is still present. Correlation does not equal causation, it pays to remember that.
I suppose you could argue that the darker genes cause the wobble for different reasons, but the spider gene still causes it due to it’s lighter coloration. That would explain why blackhead seems to override the wobble, since it returns the spider to a normal looking snake. If the lack of melanin causes the issue, then the return of melanin should fix it, right? But if that were the case then wouldn’t other dark morphs that include spider lose the wobble as well? I don’t feel there’s a lot of evidence for that argument.
Is it possible the hypopigmentation more simply refers to “lack” or reduction of black pigment rather than just meaning “lighter”? As in there is less black pigment, it is still there and of dark color, but has less presence in the overall color of the animal? In our hobby when we think hypo we think lighter color, but perhaps they are referring to the animal just having less black color than a normal.
I think for all wobble genes, whether darker or lighter, there is something causing that imbalance or defect neurologically. It may be different for each gene or related to the same root cause.
Hi everybody. I would like to start by saying that it has been a long time since the last time i logged to the forum and quite frankly i have skipped over the majority of this tread as a good chunk of it contains people arguing with each other.
However.
A few days ago, i had this… I think i should call it an idea. So i was watching my queen bee female exploring her newly modified habitat and trying to slither up the branch from the bottom side up side down. It made me think. What if the way we imagine the wobble to work is different than what it is?
Again. I’m no biologist or herpetologist or neurologist or anything and i may be totally wrong, but please hear me out.
What if the wobble condition wasn’t neurological in the sense of mental illness but a physical one?
I guess that the majority of spider gene snake owners and breeders agree with me that the wobble is most notable when the snake is a) about to strike a prey b) periscoping and c) while stretching out unsuspended. In all of these instances i have noticed that the moment my snake comes in contact with a solid object, she immediately stops wobbling. But when she moves around, curls on her own, or while eating her prey, she doesn’t show any signs of unsure movements, twitches, or spasms different from other non-spiders.
So my hypothesis is - what if the spider gene messes up the gravitation sensing cells (or neurons or whatever are those called) or with the proper processing of their signals? If that was the case, it would make sense for the snake to wobble, since it wouldn’t know which way is down.
Without this sense, it wouldn’t be able to fine tune the muscle tension correctly to keep the ballance on a reflex level and instead would have to process its position through the sight and touch, both of which take longer to respond to (plus to see that you are not motionless you have to move to begin with so the response is even more delayed in cases when it can only depend on one sense - sight - insteade of 2 - sight and touch). And so the snake starts tilting one way, corrects its position based on the sight, overcompensates, then has to do the same thing again but in the oposite direction, continuing this cycle 3 times per second or so. It would also explain the head tilt - if you don’t know which way is down you don’t know what is horizontal and you have to estimate. As a result, you would most likely end up being wrong.
If this was true, it could explain why some spiders are bad feeders - they need to use their brain a lot more to process visual stimulus and then if they miss their strike or 2 or 3 they get frustrated and stressed faster than non-spiders which is known to be the direct oposite of being helpful for oh-so-needed cognitive functions. The snake gives up and learns that missing the strike due to only ever finding constantly moving targets (constantly moving from the subjective point of shaky spiders) means no food at all and it loses the interest in future feedings that look and smell the same way as those always moving targets.
Now if this hypothesis was true, it could mean several things.
- we are dealing with a physical disability instead of a mental one
- there may be a visible change in spider’s brain structure with BETTER developed sight and/or touch processing centrum due to the hightened mental traffic
- there would be no differences in muscle tension or muscle strength of spider and non-spider individuals as the peoblem is the missing sense rather than the body itself
- adding the touch stimulus (such as grass or leaves sticking up from the substrate and generally more enrichments) to the equation should solve or at least diminish the problem of the wobble in non-feeding situations as it aids into the sense imput of the animal
- spiders could be entirely unbothered by low or maybe even zero gravitation shpuld they have enough physical enrichments such as branches around (and no i have no idea how to prove this other than sending a bunch of snakes to ISS)
- for the safety of animals they should be kept in lower habitats (my girl would casually try to crawl up the ceiling because she thinks that touch means down and then she would flomp down because not it doesn’t so i had to move her to 30cm tall terrarium instead of 45cm so she wouldn’t hurt herself)
- the corkscrewing could be explained as the extreme stress response where higher cognitive functions basically go offline due to adrenalin. The snake ignores the sight and touch as procesing those to support the movement is not its primary ability. When any other snake would slither away or coil, spiders become uncoordinated and in their confusion move in spiral instead of in the wave pattern.
Again. I may be entirely wrong, but in my head, this explanation makes sense.
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Even mental illness is biological at its roots, whether that be through altered levels of neurotransmitters at the synapses, loss of certain neuronal subtypes or altered brain circuitry. The mutation that causes the spider patterning also presents with a neurological phenotype that is similar to to ataxia in humans, which manifests as poor coordination, difficulty with fine motor tasks, unsteady walk and stumbling, impaired balance and muscle tremors. This also wouldn’t be the first neurological condition that worsens with stress and agitation - think about people who stutter, severe causes of autism, Parkinson’s, etc. Many of these conditions are manageable in day to day life, but periods of agitation will temporarily worsen the phenotype.
I don’t know if anyone has actually compared the brain morphology of spider ball pythons with “normals”, but I was actually toying with the idea last week. It wouldn’t be that hard to compare sizes of various brain regions, relative abundance of various neuron types, etc. It would be super fun to try and pinpoint the actual neuronal changes that cause all of the neurological phenotypes seen in spider ball pythons
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What are the other genes on the second snake down? Gorgeous!
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Pastel butter leopard spider and either vanilla or fire
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The term hypopigmentation, by definition, means less than normal pigment. It is not specific to a type of pigment. Pigment-specific reductions have their own designations, like hypomelanism (less than normal melanin) and hypoxanthism (less than normal xanthin)
Even taking that into account, the Spider morph still produced normal levels of melanin, it is just that the localization/distribution of that melanin is atypic. More on that below
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No one in the community has ever said this was a mental illness type issue (at least, no one without some kind of anti-Spider agenda). It is 100% a physiological issue.
The nature of the Spider (and others in the allelic complex) mutation is something that impacts melanocyte migration. As with nearly everything when it comes to cellular/molecular biology, very few things play only one single specific role. So it is with melanocytes. Yes, they are named for their primary role of holding melanin, but they have a number of other roles as well. One of those roles is in directing enervation along the neural crest. When the nerves involved in that do not lay down properly, you obviously get issues. Depending on the nature of the issue you might get something like deafness (as seen in dalmatians) or blindness (as seen in a number of species) or inner ear/balance related issues…
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