I had just gotten a new female California kingsnake as a gift and the morph is labeled “aberrant”. I’m planning on breeding her in the future so I am using the morphmarket calculator to see possible offsprings, but there is no aberrant morph on the list of morphs for kingsnakes. Can somebody please tell me if there is a mistake with the morph or the calculator please?
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Welcome to the board! It just means that the pattern is non-standard. An aberration. Not the result of a single pattern-altering mutation.
Beautiful Cali!
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Aberrant is usually used to describe a cal king that doesn’t have the normal banded pattern that the species is known for. It tends to be more of a line bred or polygenic trait than an actual mutation.
A lot of Cal kingsnake were thought to be a subspecies that displayed an aberrant pattern. Testing proved it as a different species. It was simply called aberrant California kingsnake for a while.
There is the possibility for some that may not be a pure line of cal king as well. Sometimes crossbreeds from down the line can still have effect on future generations and pop one that looks a bit different. Though usually it’s the Mexican black kingsnake that tends to get crossbred over cal kings.
I’m not familiar enough with the morphs or other kings to tell you much more than that. Just some random facts I keep stowed away from when I owned one. XD
Hopefully someone can come in and tell you what exactly that should mean for breeding and calcing yours…
But also I would consider finding a bit more information from the breeder as well if the person who gifted you can look into it.
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Thank you for explaining to me what aberration means, but does that mean my California Kingsnake is a “hybrid” and has an unknown morph?
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I don’t think yours would fall into the hybrid area at all. It’s just an example of why some aberrant happened, not saying it was for yours. I’m just not sure if yours fell into the “random pattern” vs “which Cal king species” getula vs californiae
Most likely, yours is just from an aberrant high white californiae line. It’s not a trait that can be passed on like say albino. But breeding your girl to another high white or aberrant should still result in some cool looking babies.
If you bred her to say a regular looking cal king, the offspring would most likely be a mix ranging from slightly wonky normal patterns to some nice high whites but not as crazy as your girl.
Cal kings are bred for high white pretty often, so the odds of her being a hybrid would be much less common. And it was definitely more common for cal kings to be bred into Mexican Black Kings. So that would probably be a much more reduced pattern.
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Unless it’s been tracked as a locality it’s fair to say that any Cal King has a chance at having hybrid blood. That doesn’t mean Python x Kingsnake or anything wild usually. Typically it means that in the pursuit of color or pattern combinations people have mixed in Desert Kings, MBKs, or Baja Kings. 99.9999999% of people would never register those crosses as hybrids because they’re all extremely similar.
I have a ton of Kings and the only ones I bother to label as hybrids are my patternless Hypermelanistic animals because that morph is from Lampropeltis nitida which is the Baja California Kingsnake.
What you have there is simply a high white aberrant. I wouldn’t bother to label it as anything else. Anyone that cares about purity won’t mess with anything that doesn’t have lineage because we do try to keep certain historic localities pure to preserve them. But most of us also have ‘mutts’ that are mixed locality or morph animals.
Check out this website that Ross Padilla runs and you too can go down the endless rabbit hole of this species. Ross is sort of our honorary historian because he was willing to compile and maintain all this information.
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