Just got these guys in and pretty happy with my bag! A few have bright orange colors, banding alien heads, granite pixels, ect. Very excited. Got a share of normals too
1 First hold back
3 I’m thinking Granite?
4 Alien heads cross over dorsal?
5 Super excited for this guy. Cool banding
7
9 Absolutely love the color and patterns!
10
J
I hate to say it, but normal until proven otherwise.
Sure you have a couple neat little ones, but unless you take the time to prove them out you can’t know what you have for sure. There’s no breeder lineage to track the parentage from. So anything is just taking a dart to a list on the wall.
Aside from mutations, a ball python can also be affected by incubation and polymorphic traits from the parents.
Hopefully the one you call granite proves out to be something genetic. That little one just looks great.
Also… The above being said
The plus side to these would be taking a fresh set of genetic material to a captive bred line. So regardless of if they prove out as anything morphwise, you can strengthen the line you have. Which is good when you consider the things like linebreeding for morphs and such with the hot genes on the market
A little bit of a buzz kill, but of course @armiyana is correct on all accounts! Worst case you have fresh blood for your lines! Best case they will prove out to be a new mutation! I am thinking hopefully that granite one will prove, with the bands on some and especially that banded 5th one hard to say. I do love the colors on the 7th and 9th! The 9th is super banded and clear bright belly as well! How is the belly on 7 that one has orange flames up the side not white which may indicate some yb complex type of stuff, also the pattern with the granite and fused weird alien heads has me pulling for that one!
Very very cool! I’ve wanted to do a grab bag and/or start an import project since I was first looking into breeding 5-6 years ago. If you get a new gene, awesome, but if not you still get awesome fresh bloodlines, and I have a strong hypothesis that the quality of morphs can largely depend on the quality of the “normal” base of the animal, so I’d absolutely love someday to work with some really bright, high-contrast imports and have a long term project to see how a super bright base normal affects established morph expression. Also, thanks for posting these - so many people never do and I’m always curious to see what people get!
As for genes - as mentioned above, definitely all “normal” until proven otherwise. I would say that one of the most annoying things about imports is how many people get a gene that looks and acts like another established gene but insists on calling it something different, so my best recommendation for ones that prove out as genetic would be to pair them to whatever the closest related gene is (or something else in the same complex). 3 definitely looks consistent with granite genes so I’d get another granite gene (granite, nanny, orbit, etc.) and see how it interacts.
Aside from that I’m not seeing anything that looks obviously related to another morph we already have. I think 9 and 10 are my favorites, personally. Even if not simple mendelian genetic, you could always try pairing them with something like enchi/blade/chocolate and see if you get any more pattern reduction.
I really like this idea for a long term project!
Although I totally understand the frustration of this:
I think that until there is definite genetic proof that similar/same morphs are genetically identical you have to separate them with names and or bloodlines. Simply because if some morphs may look the same each morph/line came from different people/breeders who took the time and generations to prove it out, so they have to be acknowledged as separate until the genetics prove otherwise.
That is the reason I would not breed a import granite to a similar looking granite type morph, then you wouldn’t know exactly which animal affected the offspring, unless you get a super form but even then it could be more of a ALS or interaction between the two traits, until you prove out the original import. The best way to prove out a new morph is breeding the animal with the suspected trait to a known only wild type(normal) snake, then if you get any visual influence from the resulting offspring breed it back to the original animal(in this case the import granite and see if you get a visual super form or at least more offspring that looks like the original, which would make it a incomplete dominant morph(co-dom) with perhaps a non visual super form. If it were me I would cheat this long proving process slightly by breeding the suspected granite(in this case) to a single recessive trait like clown, just to get het. recessives in the first generation. Then do the same process to see if there is a visual super or co-dom morph. Technically this is wrong too, because you can have a het. Influence but with this granite type animal I would hope the offspring would be different enough to tell if they got this granite type trait.
No, I definitely agree with you in general that you have to do all of those breeding trials in order to figure out if the suspected trait is indeed the same or different. My gripe is that in my opinion folks should not be releasing genes as genes or trying to get them added to MM or other databases until all of those trials have been done. For instance, this is how we got multiple different genes (creed, flame, eramosa, etc) that are named something different than fire but look and act identical to fire in combos and in supers/ALS. For instance, eramosa got added to the Morphpedia database but eramosa looks identical to fire in every combo I’ve seen and when we asked Corey if he bred it to fire complex, he said he didn’t have any to his collection - so in that case it wasn’t even bred to see if it was allelic, much less any further breeding trials, before being proposed as a brand new gene that he’s charging thousands for. But that’s a conversation for a different day - just wish people would really put in the full amount of work before saying something is a “new” gene. Just leads to confusion for new keepers, strange affects on the market and morph values due to rarity/recognition, etc.
But on the other note, yes, I’m really excited to work with imports! I’ve always heard a lot of people say “just normals” or “normals are so dull” but I really believe that a lot of the reason normals tend to look so dull is because most folks breed for morph combination rather than morph expression. Even if imports I got didn’t prove to be genetic morphs, I would really want to combine them with existing morphs to see how much a good, high color/contrast normal base set of genetics could enhance morphs we already have. Something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but it will have to wait until I finish graduate school and can move into a much bigger house (and have a much more stable income).
