Has anyone ever done a volta gene project? I haven’t seen any volta’s on here that have any morphs.
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As far as I have been told and am aware, ‘Volta’ ball pythons are just a marketing ploy. It’s just natural size variation and very few of the claimed ‘Volta’ animals are actually from that region. If you want to do a size-based project, I would just start with the largest adults you can find.
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Yeah Volta isn’t a gene, it’s a locality. Here’s the Morphipedia article on it.
https://www.morphmarket.com/morphpedia/ball-pythons/volta/
Supposedly BPs in that region have been larger and females may produce larger clutches than average. But that just led to people claiming to have a Volta if they had a larger than average BP. But it’s not a mutation that can be reliably passed down like a recessive or co-dom.
When you cross a locality to a non locality like every other morph of BP, they are no longer ‘pure’. You would have 50% Volta locality offspring. And obviously that number goes down the more times you breed it and will never be 100% ever again unless you keep to just breeding pure Volta to pure volta
As inspirationexotics said, starting a polygenic project focusing on larger animals would be the better approach. However projects like this in BPs will take time. You will need to keep track of offspring sizes and hold back quite a few offspring to wait and see which ones grow larger. The focus is just to breed larger than average BPs together and keep that trend going so the line can reliably produce larger than average offspring. The downside is each time you outcross for new blood you may be taking a step back in the project as well.
People like the fast and furious competition that mutations cause in the BP breeding circles. Line bred projects like Super dwarf Retics, blue or black in Green Tree Pythons or Black Night leopard geckos that take generations is not the way for most.
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This is going to be a bit pedantic, but this is a pretty complex point that’s worth clarifying. There are definitely situations in which tracking this sort of lineage by % makes sense, and the Volta case might be one of them since there’s at least some assumption that a snake with more Volta parentage in its background might end up being larger.
But it isn’t accurate to say that an animal is “50% Volta locality”, since locality isn’t something that comes in percents. An animal is a locality animal, or it isn’t – and a snake with one Volta locale parent and one parent that isn’t Volta locale just ain’t a locality animal since we have a category for what it is: it is “NLS” – non-locale specific. And you can’t breed any number of pure locality animals back into it to get offspring that are locality specific, because ‘locality specific’ just means descended from animals that were all from that locality.
So, ‘Volta’ is indeed a locality, but it is also a shorthand name for an assumed trait (relating to body size and clutch size) that can be traced in ways that are a little more like the ways in which we track genes.
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That’s fair. A valid point.
It something that’s done more with Super dwarf Retics that I’ve picked up. It’s not commonly done with most other outcrossing. It at least generally tracks the outcrossing better than I feel most others have done when working with localities or certain polygenic traits.
I can at least say a 62.5% Kalatoa is from a smaller stock. If bred to another high % outcross then the odds of having traits like that size and some of the polygenic appearance is easier to expect in offspring.
Without saying a % it’s easy to just keep saying, “well the parent was from volta blood” and it just is a vague way of keeping track because how many branches does that blood go through?
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Volta is a marketing scam. With a group of friends we bought a gravid ‘Volta’ from outback. It laid 10 eggs, they all hatched, we split them up and raised all of them. Fed somewhat aggressively, they were smaller than any of our captive bred stuff at 3 years old. By 5 years they still hadn’t outpaced our captive bred stuff.
Dr. Tillis went to Ghana and has a better understanding of the region than we all do. Volta is effectively a state in Ghana that is 3600 square miles.
What’s most likely happening is either the area is collected infrequently so they’re finding old snakes, or the snakes are eating gambian pouch rats effectively power feeding themselves. Keep in mind, Ian isn’t there when these animals are collected so they could come from anywhere.
If the Volta myth were true all of the big breeders would have bred it into their collections years ago to improve their odds with bigger clutches. Heck, so many of them get sold every year and have been for 20 years, where are the super giant ball pythons laying 14-15 eggs at 3-4 years old?
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Yeah. That is the most likely case.
Sometimes I just want to believe 
And given the popularity of the idea of a giant BP, even if there was a larger line there with the way BPs were collected and imported originally then the line could have been lost really quickly from the pet trade and outcrossing combo.
My oldest male is my largest BP. He is longer than any of my females, I just keep him lean so at a glance he seems smaller.
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I have some clown stuff that was produced in 2006 that are huge. They have huge babies and the babies get pretty big too. The male is 3kg and the female is on a breed loan but she’s a sold 4kg but really long. I also have a random het pied that’s about 15 or 16 that’s a monster. In 2016 I sold a buddy a GHI Enchi baby that was almost 5’ at 3 years old and laid 10 eggs her first clutch. Last couple times she’s laid 13-14 eggs.
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