Solar Serpents breeding plans for 2025

caryl · August 15, 2025, 2:24am

Wow, Olivia!! You’re having lots of surprises this season, of the good kind! Big congrats on the new clutch! Altair is a gorgeous little dude and the rest are lovely, too. I really like Hydra’s big, bold markings. The freshly shed babies all look terrific. I’m glad you survived that “terrible” attack by Jinx the Mysterious.

solarserpents · August 15, 2025, 4:04am

Correct! Dad is homozygous stripe (and the dad last year was also homo stripe, so this isn’t retained sperm from a motley), mom is proven het stripe. Since stripe and motley are allelic, with motley being dominant over stripe, there shouldn’t be any way for this pairing to produce motleys. And the other stripes in this clutch (and mom’s clutch last year) were all very nice, but typical presentation of tessera stripe.

deanaii · August 15, 2025, 12:16pm

Any outsider looking at that Tessera Mockley would think there’s some piece of info you’re missing. But there isn’t! Unless that piece of info is that there’s more going on at the Stripe locus than we know. Maybe even another allele.

snakes_of_shadowlake · August 15, 2025, 3:33pm

Yeah, that info from Caryl a while back sure was interesting. I thought I had motley and stripe down, but now I imagine there simply has to be some kind of cross over between motley and stripe that we just can’t pin down with Mendelian genetics.

deanaii · August 15, 2025, 4:25pm

I think that’s a pretty good hypothesis right there. A crossover event. Possibly made more likely by the presence of homo or het influence from pattern-modifying mutations like Cinder and Sunkissed.

solarserpents · August 16, 2025, 1:06am

Most of the babies from the palmetto clutch are out now! Just waiting on the last two. I feel like there might be some red factor floating around in this clutch. Several of the babies are quite saturated.

Aquila, amel:

Orion, palmetto male:

Vega, amel:

Virgo, amel:

Pyxis, normal:

Vela, normal:

Betelgeuse, amel:

Antares, normal:

And Andromeda, female palmetto:

deanaii · August 16, 2025, 1:26am

I look forward to seeing the Amels after shed. And the rest.

caryl · August 17, 2025, 3:38am

Some of them are very colorful! I’d say you’re right about the RF. They’re all so cute! Big congrats!

solarserpents · August 17, 2025, 5:00pm

Thanks! And the last two are out. A female palmetto named Lyra and a male normal named Cepheus.

The babies in this clutch aren’t huge like some of my others this year, but they’re all a decent size, mostly in the high 7s-8 gram range. Nothing below 7 grams.