Messing around with the morph calculator trying to understand it a little better.
In this image, someone please explain if I am wrong but If I had a banana coral glow het clown and bred with a normal the offspring could either come out looking like the normal but het with clown, or they could come out looking just like the father which would be the banana coral glow?
Banana and coral glow are the same morph, different name. So offspring from your pairing would be either 1. normal 50% possible het clown or 2. banana/coral glow (whichever name you wanna go with) 50% possible het clown.
Forgot to upload this one but could you give me some insight on this one as well? Going back to your reply, that’s interesting I always thought whatever you was to breed with a normal would just turn out normal het.
The results shown look correct for the pairing entered.
The difference is if the gene is a recessive or not.
Recessive genes like piebald, albino, clown and axanthic for example won’t have visual hets. The heterozygous animals will look like a normal when bred to a normal.
Mojave , banana/CG and GHI have visual hets and the homozygous version is typically called a ‘super’.
A single gene or heterozygous Mojave for example looks very different from a normal/wild type. Two Mojave genes, the ‘super’ Mojave or homozygous Mojave is a blue eyed lucistic.
You can learn a lot about the different genes in the morphipedia here or on world of ball pythons
Interesting. I guess what I’m trying to figure out is what could I breed with my normal to have a chance at making something else besides the normal, granted I know I can still hit the normal.
There are ways to never hatch a normal. This is why it’s important to really know about the genes before you try breeding. There are some genes that will cause problems like kinking, stillborns or eye issues.
If you breed the homozygous form of an incomplete dominant (super) or an allelic combination of incomplete dominants you would never hit a normal.
A homozygous/super pastel will have all pastel offspring.
A Blue eye Lucy will have the 2 genes that give you the white snake, no normals.
This could be as simple as hatching all mojaves or a mix of 2 genes from the blue eyed Lucy complex like lesser and bamboo.
A freeway is an allelic combo from the super stripe complex. So all hatchlings from that snake would be asphalt or yellowbelly.
The best advice I can give though is to look at what you would want to produce first. Once you know what you want and which genes you’ll be working with it’s much easier to figure out calculating offspring.
I guess what I’m asking is what kinda of male would be worth looking into to breed with my normal female my het pied normal female. Would love to breed just my normal but I don’t wanna end up with all ones that look like her even tho she is absolutely stunning
If she’s het for pied, I would definitely consider something that is pied for a male so every baby will at least be carrying the pied gene, even if they don’t show it.
That being said… Anything else to add in would be up to you. I would look through the pied listings on the market for an idea of what you would want to see or work towards.
Just some advice though.
Take time to really learn about the morphs and combos. And how to ID them.
Have a vet planned already in case of emergencies with Mom or any of the offspring.
And be prepared to possibly be holding onto snakes for quite a while as the market is saturated right now and it can be hard to move them.
Yea so far I’ve got a
Females: Albino het pied
Normal (possibly something else)
Normal het pied
Then a Pied het albino male
Just trying to see what else to get. I’ve still got a lot to learn
The best thing you can possibly get is a gene combo you are really passionate about. The market is oversaturated, there are a ton of people breeding animals they can’t ID and normal ball pythons are not desirable because the hobby is so morph-focused. I always tell people to really consider why you want to breed (if the answer is money or fun; and if you don’t have enclosures ready for all the babies, an incubator, know your husbandry well, are prepared for potential vet costs, are prepared to potentially need to assist feed babies) and if you’re not prepared to keep all of the babies for a long time - I’m talking a year or more in the current market - then I would recommend against breeding.
That said, if you decide you want to do it, you need to do it for passion. So learn the genetics, learn what morphs YOU like, learn how those morphs work and how to ID them, and breed for yourself first. I have a couple of normal ball pythons and I do not breed them unless it’s with a 5+ gene male. So if you want to breed, I would not recommend making plans around or getting any more normals.
I couldn’t agree more! I mainly want to do it for a hobby, definitely don’t want anymore normals tho, my daughter got me out of the 2 we have. I think for now I’ll stick with my pieds and hopefully get an albino pied. I was just curious if you had a male with all these different morphs and bred it with a normal could you get something other then a normal. I was under the impression if you was to breed a normal and it wasn’t het with anything they would all turn out normal even if your other one had X amount of genes. I’ve still got about 2 more years before my female is ready to breed, slowly building up. While it would be nice to make a nice profit on them, that’s not what I’m chasing (I’d be happy breaking even) but yeah, was just curious about the above statement. Appreciate your insight!! You ALL have been a big help!
There are three different types of genes in ball pythons - recessive, incomplete dominant, and dominant. With recessives, you’re correct that in order to show visually the animal needs two copies (homozygous) of that gene. Albino, lavender albino, clown, pied, and hypo are examples of recessive genes in BPs. If you were to breed any of these to a normal, you would get all normals if the female was NOT het.
However, the vast majority of ball python genes are incomplete dominant, meaning they only need one copy (heterozygous) to show the gene. Banana, pastel, yellowbelly and all related genes, fire and all related genes, spider, cinnamon are all examples of incomplete dominant genes. So if you breed a banana fire hypo to a normal, you couldn’t get any visual hypos but you WOULD expect about 50% of the offspring to be banana, or fire, or both.
There are also dominant genes, which work exactly the same way as incomplete dominant, just that there is no difference between the heterozygous phenotype and the homozygous one. Leopard and pinstripe are examples of this. They get the full visual phenotype with one copy of the gene (heterozygous) and though they can genetically be homozygous and always pass a copy down to offspring, they won’t look visually any different.
I’d say easily 80% of existing ball python morphs are incomplete dominant. So it is very easy to breed a multi-gene animal to a normal and get different morphs. Just as long as those morphs aren’t exclusively recessive, and there are a lot more inc doms available than recessives.
On MorphMarket, incomplete dominant genes are blue and recessive genes are pink.
Thank you so much!! This one was a huge help!
