If the parents is both hog island sunset
Sunset +sunset. How come the litter be only pos sunset and not super sunset.
Can some one explain i for me ?
Best regard Bigjim sweden
I think its just that sunset isn’t a natural morph of hog island it’s a mix of a hypo bci and a hog island hogs are kind of a natural hypo already but It’s all about the percentage of hog blood I don’t think you can get a real super sunset or het/pos het sunset but that’s my loose understanding I’m not too sure
Going off memory from the mid 2000’s here but I believe the originators wanted a certain ratio of hog island blood with the hypo variants being the “sunsets”. The super aspect of the genes relates to the single gene mutation (hypomelanism), when the animal receives two alleles of the mutation, making it “homozygous”, it is sometimes termed as a super. The “super” label often applies (or at least used to) to mutations that have a differing visual form between heterozygous (1 allele) and homozygous (2 alleles) forms. With hypomelanism in boas it’s not obviously apparent. I dont think the “sunset” label required the animal to be a proven homozygous hypo, just a certain percentage of Hog Island blood. Unless I’m wrong about the hypomelanistic homozygous (aka “super”) requirement I’m not sure why one would label a sunset x sunset offspring as “possible sunset”.
A sunset should be a super hypo 75% of more hog island. If you breed 2 together, you get all sunsets. If they are labeled possible, then one or more of the parents were either a hypo hog, or the seller does not understand the genetics.
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A hypo x hog was called a sunset in the US for a time. In Europe it was called a het sunset.
In time it changed to the sunset being the super hypo hog boa and the non super just being called hypo hog.
Sadly breeders often sell boas as sunsets when they could only be hypo hogs. They pick the brightest thinking they must be super hypo but you have to prove it out via breeding.
Ideally you should have 50%+ hog island in them to be a sunset (it didn’t have to be 75% stated above) often the more hog in them the better they look but that’s not always the case and I have seen sunsets with less than 50% that are just as good as ones with more.
It used to be said hogs were a natural hypo but it’s certainly not hypo like every other hypo boa out there. I tend to say it’s more like a pastel where it can pas on a variety of looks some with good pastel like looks and other not so bright it more flecked.
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Yeah if you look at pure Hog Island boas, they vary in coloration and darkness etc, hence why a Sears Hog Island will look a bit different to another. More or less orange, maybe more striping and stuff. But that’s also the issue with trying to create a line that’s part locality (or possibly even species, as I think pure Hogs we’re not included in that study of 75ish genetic samples that separated out Sigma and Imperator, so who knows)
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Their imperator. All that Coast is.
For now. If more genome sequencing is done that may change. The paper that changed BCC/BCI to BC/BI/BS only had 77 specimens, tho they did include 2-3 Island localities. It would make sense for us to have more sub species or true boa species as time goes on, or just other general rearranging of the genus.
It’s so diverse and wide ranging, there’s probably far more genetic material worth going through. The samples used in said study was even partly from captive populations, which is fine to a degree but it also means even more for wild populations in tiny areas that may have isolated at some point or interbred or experienced some evolutionary pressure etc.
It’s exciting! But it also lends credence to both scientific and locality names being useful. They are still both just tools to describe and classify, I suppose.
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It’s still Bcc as that’s the nominate. All Boa constrictor spies fall under Bc. Just easier to write Bc and Bi
Boa imperator, as there are now subspecies would really be B. i. i as the nominate according to the rules of taxonomy.
I doubt hogs are anything more than imperator and just rafted from the mainland sometime in the past.
Maybe, but the same was said about Mexican boas, and I wonder for the rest since BCL, BCO and maybe even BCA have varying levels of similarities to BCC vs BCI. Maybe imperator will end up being that which has more branching, but I think much, much more genetic testing would need to be done. Boas cover such a huge swath of land, 75 (or even 100) specimens barely covers anything as far as potential genetic diversity - even just in captivity, let alone also in the wild.
Let alone which locality may fall under which species (or sub species, new or old) considering things like Paraguana Pennisula boas or the various Venezuelan or Ecuador locales. Some will be exactly what we expect but just looking at the amount of variety and the sheer number of specimens, there’s got to be more surprises in store.
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