Question purely from my own curiosity. Do we know, from an evolutionary or biological standpoint, why ball pythons have SO many morphs? Wild types do vary quite a bit, and many original morph founder specimen were wild caught, but most wild BPs are just normals, so why the vast and wild differentiation in color and pattern genes?
I know BPs are worked with more than other species, so there is a bit of human effort bias there: we looked/experimented more, so we’ve found more. But it really seems to me that BPs have so much more morph potential than other popular snakes like boas and corns.
Is this a misperception on my part? And if BPs truly do have so many more possible morphs than other species, do we know why? Maybe a silly question, but it struck me as interesting.
From my pov I think all animals life has the ability to have a wide phenotypic range as long as they have variable and mutating genes.
Like you said BPs might just be more prevalently different because we’ve put more effort into discovering what we can produce within the species via selective breeding, line breeding and sometimes just pure luck turned into the prior 2.
My belief that all species are capable of this variability stems from the fact that many species (not just reptiles) share and are capable of leucism, albinism, pied variants, etc… even if these shared characteristics have different effects or are produced differently between species.
I think it’s mainly a numbers game. For years huge numbers of wild bred ball python eggs were dug up, hatched in Africa, sorted and exported. Trying to remember some of the official yearly numbers back in the day (late 90s early 2000s). Maybe 140,000? Any obvious morphs were picked out to be sold to breeders for big $ compared to the normals going into the pet trade. I heard an Ivory went for $150K. Small clutch size so lots of different pairings probably helped too. Out of all those clutches bound to be a few het X het even for rare genes.
Oh WOW I had genuinely no idea that wild caught exports were so massive - no wonder a lot more in-depth morph work can be done via breeding with that sort of source material
As Randy note, it is mostly a numbers bias and some savvy business practices by the exporters. Because they were dealing with huge numbers of offspring and there was no predation happening to them, it was easy for all the different things to be found and reproduced. You see the same with most of the genetic model species - mice, zebrafish, fruit flies…Captive populations makes it easier to pick up everything before it gets purged from the population
I suppose that is why corns have many many morphs too then, compared to animals who have wild counterparts that are harder to find en mass, interesting!
It wouldn’t surprise me because of how bad some of the husbandry was back then. It was just around when the Internet became more attainable for everyone, but there still wasn’t as much of a online community at the time. You basically had to be in the niche groups, know someone or go to shows to really have the best knowledge.
Before then I was thankfully a big book nerd, so I was reading magazine articles and books on reptiles to up my husbandry as a kid. My mom was so proud that I was able to tell her I needed to take the iguana to the vet and tell the vet it was MBD, here’s the symptoms-
That was thankfully how I learned that UVB bulbs need to be replaced at least yearly (unless you have the now commonly available UV card testers) and not just when they burn out.
Meanwhile… I saw a lot of other people constantly going through reptiles in my class