I am right over the 100 snake mark with hatchlings right now 
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My one problem with people saying “they don’t look like they are in pain”
is that we really can’t tell I mean animals I.G don’t show pain well. (I know this for a fact)
not saying they are downright WRONG but still.
Pain=stress…Stress=won’t breed, won’t eat, respiratory infections, etc. Those of us who’ve been breeding ball pythons for 7-10-15+ years know what a stressed out animal looks and acts like.
How do so many Spiders live full lives if they’re in pain and thereby under major stress?
Many of us have a large number of these animals who’re living healthy uneventful lives. We have a much larger sample size and many more years of experience than most pet keepers have or will achieve. It’s hard to refute the experience of the hobby at large, that they eat fantastically, and breed well often over decades of life.
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I agree, just because they can’t say how they feel, doesn’t mean you can’t tell.
Our spider doesn’t like it when his enclosure is changed, he shows his frustration and so we keep changes to a minimal.
I think it comes down to how well you know your snakes on a personal level and the experience you’ve had with them.
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While I agree with you overall with the spider gene this is not true at all imo ball pythons are notoriously easy to breed they certainly will breed when they are stressed and when it isn’t always good for them health wise. People get clutches all the time from there stressed and or unhealthy ball pythons. I think plenty of us who have done this long enough have had plenty of moments where we have cringed at the condition of a ball python that a “breeder” has gotten to “successfully” reproduce. I feel by using they wouldn’t breed argument we just give the anti spider side more bullet points because imo it’s simply not true.
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Sure they will once or maybe even twice but nothing that’s really stressed is going recover, breed, recover, breed, etc over and over again for a decade or two.
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Agree they would probably die eventually but I do believe even stressed and unhealthy they will do it longer than people realize. So I don’t think we should use this to justify a pro spider view point.
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If we accept this premise (I am not saying I do or do not, just using this as a logic problem) then we also have to accept the opposite premise that the combination of our inability to tell and the animal’s tendency to “hide” pain means that you also cannot use/rely on/perpetuate the argument of “But they are in pain because only an animal in pain would act like that.”
Two sides of the same coin
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that’s fair I see what you’re talking about, makes sense!
Here’s our take:
We don’t touch wobble-prone genes or Supers (or others with possible health issues.) This means we have a collection free of Spider, Champagne, Woma, HGW, or Sable, and we will not produce Super Spotnose/Black Pastel/Black Head etc.
Does this feel limiting at times?
In all honesty? A little. It’s hard to not get a little fomo when a big breeder pushes out a new Champagne combo, or when we can’t pair two SNs.
However, NOTHING is worth it to us to risk an animal’s wellbeing. As keepers, we see ourselves as their guardians and we take “playing god” with genetics and creating little lives as a sacred responsibility. It is a luxury to be able to sit at a keyboard and speculate whether or not they could feel this pain. We ask – if it’s even a possibility, why risk it just for something as superficial as aesthetics?
There is clearly something basally unsound with the Spider gene – if you have two animals that look the same, the end result should not be dead offspring. (Is this a 
hot take ? Maybe. But I quite literally have my degree in this.)
TLDR:
We have a responsibility to do right by our animals and their offspring, based on the best knowledge we have at any given point. We won’t tell anyone how they should run their collection, and we aren’t trying to pick a fight. We can only say that never bring wobble-genes in has been right for us; it’s resulted in sleeping easier and appreciative customers.
Keep on Herping,
- Fawkes
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Indeed, this is a very hot take.
You should also add Chocolate, wookie, and cypress to your list. And despite spotnose in general not displaying wobble a close friend of my produced a single gene spotnose that has as much wobble as any bad spider does.
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I feel the same way. I don’t have anything against anyone for keeping spiders, i just have no intention of doing so. I believe that spider bp’s even with wobble has a chance to liver a happy life, just like any other animal, but for me there are plenty other beautiful morphs out there that don’t have wobble. And i am going to agree with @zooophagous here, I wouldn’t buy an animal that has been intentionally bred knowing there’s a defect. No hate against spiders or spider breeders, just my overall take on things.
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I wonder if maybe a big chunk of the controversy with Spiders stems from using words like “defect” when speaking and writing about their condition. I know that “defect” can literally just mean a deviation or difference, and of course that’s what any mutation is, at least when it is new - some do become the new normal, after all, which is how evolution happens, right? But I think for most people “defect” has a much more negative connotation than “difference.” It’s obvious that Spiders are different from what we call Normals or Wild Types. They look different and are prone to wobbling when they move. But I would pose that just because something behaves differently doesn’t mean that its difference is bad. And I’m thinking that’s where the controversy really lies. We can all see that Spiders are different. But some judge their difference to be bad/harmful, and others judge it to be just… difference. I think people are making a lot of assumptions by guessing that a wobbly snake is stressed or in pain, or even uncomfortable. Of course, we are also guessing if we assume they are not stressed or in pain, to a degree. They are not stressed enough to not eat and breed - that much is obvious. But are they more stressed than a non-Spider? I would argue that a well-kept Spider is probably under a lot less stress than a wild Normal, simply on account of environmental factors. A wild Normal has to worry about predators, temperature, famine… but I’m getting off topic a little.
On the whole “it acts different so it must be bad” thing. I’m guessing that’s just on account of our nature as humans. It’s interesting, because a behavior-affecting trait that is unusual for one species is almost always looked at as a problem (like say, if a squirrel was born without eyes, most people would consider that a defect in the problematic/unhealthy sense of the word), but in another species where that condition is normal, (for example, some cave-dwelling animal species that just don’t have eyes ever), it’s not bad because it’s not unusual for them. Granted, I’m not sure how a blind squirrel would fare. I would guess that in a typical setting for a wild squirrel, it would likely struggle. But in captivity, I imagine it would do fine relying on its other senses.
Or, another thought I had - different species of snakes have different ideal temperature ranges, and suffer if they are kept outside of those ranges. Suppose a ball python had a mutation that caused it to be much more sensitive to higher temperatures and more tolerant of lower temperatures? Would we call that a defect? Maybe. But couldn’t we simply house that ball python in an enclosure that suits its needs? Is keeping that defective/different ball python any different from keeping a different species of snake that has different needs to a ball python?
Just some thoughts I had on the subject after catching up on this thread. Hope I don’t poke any bears - I’m for peace and civil, respectful disagreements as far as Spiders go. I don’t think anyone here is advocating for the suffering of animals for the sake of profit - people are just looking at the same situation and drawing different conclusions, and those that don’t think Spiders suffer simply for being Spiders are okay with breeding Spiders, and those that think they do are not okay with it.
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It’s referred to as a defect because there is documentation of it causing a physical defect to the snake’s equivalent of an inner ear. It doesn’t affect all of the spider morph or spider complex wobbler at the same rate, but some do become such severe wobblers that they cannot eat properly or risk drowning in their own water bowls. The risk of having a wobbler that severe is very small, but still possible.
You can argue the point about albino causing a sensitivity or phobia to light… But that wouldn’t be called a defect in the way that spider morphs are affected.
It’s similar to saying that a kink caused by super cinnamon or caramel albino is a defect or deformity. Or a cleft lip in a super cinny is a defect.
I hope that clears up some of the confusion about how it is referred to as such.
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I think that the spider morph should stop being bred BUT only until it is improved, I have heard of efforts to improve the morph by trying to get rid of the wobble and improve the neurological issues. I know I’m going to get people saying “my spider morph ball python barely wobbles/doesn’t wobble at all” but what I want people to recognize is that the amount of wobble varies, it’s not guaranteed to be the same in all spider morph ball pythons. I think that at least the ones with bad wobble/issues should not be bred and if your going to breed the spider morph at least breed ones without the bad wobble or other issues to try and reduce the number of babies that could have it.
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From what I understand you cannot breed the wobble out of a spider complex animal, something about that part of the genetic code also affects the snakes balance (?)
And while we are making leaps and bounds in genetics testing, I dont know if there has been anything in the way of genetic modification. I imagine that would be a highly niche category and might be more controversal than the Spider Complex or hybrids ever have been.
There are a few (Very) long threads on here about the spider complex and other problematic genes with input from people with dozens of years of experience in breeding and genetics that are definitely worth a read if you have the time.
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Unfortunately these “efforts” are usually by people who don’t actually understand genetics or why you can’t “breed out the wobble”. Think of the spider morph as similar to Huntington’s disease. In Huntington’s disease, if you have more than 40 CAG repeats in your Huntington gene, you will get Huntington’s disease. In spider ball pythons, the mutation/variant that causes the spider pattern also causes the defect that people refer to as the wobble (a preliminary study showed they have an inner ear malformation, and I haven’t seen any studies yet looking at neurological function). You can’t separate that out.
Certainly in both Spider ball pythons and Huntington’s disease, you can have “modifier genes”. Genes that when perturbed can alter age of onset or severity(Huntington’s) or severity of the wobble/defect in spider ball pythons. One of these is the blackhead morph, which ameliorates the wobble to some extent (from my understanding, not fully). There are almost certainly other genetic variations within the ball python genome that affect the severity of this defect or ability to mask it in some way, however if they don’t cause a visual change in the snake and only affect the severity of the wobble, how are you going to identify them (Issue #1). The key thing here though is that these modifiers aren’t “breeding out” the wobble or improving the spider morph, theyre just masking or counteracting it. Which means that the instant you breed that snake, even if the snake itself doens’t show much of a wobble, those traits can (and will) segregate out in the offspring, so your “no wobble” spider won’t necessarily breed true (Issue #2). To solidify a polygenic phenotype (which a low/no wobble spider would have to be), it usually takes linebreeding. Which is going to be very hard/borderline impossible to do given that super spiders are lethal (Issue #3).
Given that the appeal of spider ball pythons is the color pattern, you’d also presumably need to find a genetic modifer that masks or prevents the defect, but without altering the color pattern (Issue #4). We also don’t have a reliable way to assess the severity of the wobble, as self reported assesments aren’t reliable and are incredibly subjective (Issue 5). There would need to be a reproducible way to quantitatively determine the severity of the defect, otherwise how would you know if you were actually improving it? So someone with a backround in developing behavoral assays would need to develop something like a rotarod experiment that works for ball pythons.
So the only real way forward would be to identify candidate genes that when perturbed (or overexpressed, etc and so forth) are able to suppress the “wobble” defect without altering pattern, and then make that genetic alteration in a founder stock of spider ball pythons in such a way that the trait would not segrategate out in offspring (so you’d presumably want it on the same chromosome as the spider allele, as close as possible so it doesn’t recombine out over generations). How many ball python breeders do you think have the ability and knowledge to make that happen?
I can think of maybe 4.
**please excuse any typos, it’s late and my brain isn’t quite working
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As Hilary so correctly notes, you cannot breed out the wobble. It is absolutely inherently tied to the gene responsible for the Spider mutation. This is why we also see wobble in all of the other morphs associated with that gene/region.
I will simplify Hilary’s Huntington’s comparison (which is a great one, by the way) to something more everyday observable - trying to breed the wobble out of Spider is like trying to breed the red eyes out of an amelanistic Albino. They eyes of Albinos are red because there is no melanin. The only way to stop the eyes from being red is by putting melanin back into the animal. Once you do that, you no longer have an amelanistic Albino
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