I don’t feel I’ve been quiet about this, but not everyone visits my website or bp.net and facebook is terrible for information retention (isn’t that the motivation for this forum in the first place?). So if you’ve never seen it or want to directly discuss it. Heres the super spider:
Short version, been breeding spider x spider in some fashion for years now in hopes of learning about the super spider, this pairing was a a hypo spinner x spider pairing. When the first snake pipped, I cut the rest of the clutch, found the snake pictured above still alive. Looks similar to previous suspected super spiders, nothing in my pairing explains what we see besides we are looking at a super spider, Animal died shortly after. Rest of the clutch did just fine.
Good information to be out here. It’s still crazy to me how few of these cases there are. I have and I know several people that have done plenty of Spider x Spider pairings and never hit on this super. Just crazy odds I guess. I haven’t now done a pairing to create one in a few years and probably won’t again.
Thanks for sharing
Most of the supers don’t make it full term, they would be the slugs or random bad eggs. I have 100% hatch rate the past 5+ years with non-slug eggs except for spider x spider clutches they always had some random bad eggs.
Thanks for sharing. I’ve never done a spider x spider pairing and never intend to. Tbh, the work you’ve done on the super spider is a major factor in why I choose not to breed them. It’s one thing to hear something through the grapvine and another to see it with your own eyes. Your photos and breeding results have been a real eye-opener. As sad as the journey has been, I think this kind of documentation is important.
These are some hatchlings from a bumble bee x bumble bee clutch that a friend shared. There were other healthy animals in the clutch. The white one was stillborn and the other two passed shortly after hatching. I think all 3 are super spiders with different stages of pattern development.
I’m sorry, but why would you breed a super spider when even regular spiders come out deformed and in pain? This morph causes the spider wobble, neurological issues, and kinks in their body. I really don’t understand why the spider morph or any morphs related to it are legal.
Take it this way, breeding spiders are like taking groups of people with genetic illnesses and making them breed generation after generation. They get sicker and sicker the farther they go. I say this because I sympathize with these poor snakes. Neurological pain is hell. To come out of the egg with that, I can’t even imagine. Spider breeders are genetically abusing these animals.
Looking at the deceased animals in that picture, thinking of how their whole time alive was in pain, breaks my heart. What’s the point? Because they look pretty? Because they make money? It’s still abuse.
It amazing in a few years time people forget that suggesting that spider had a lethal homozygous form got you attacked by followers of a certain breeder. We to this day, still have big breeders claiming there is nothing wrong with breeding spider x spider, despite all the glaring evidence to say otherwise. The trials I did all those years was an attempt to prove this misinformation wrong. This information has stopped others from listening to these big breeders and prevented them from doing the spider x spider breedings that were previously accepted as harmless (look at the poster above). Smoking gun proof that majority of people would accept was missing up until these trials. Deductive reasoning isn’t proof to the average person. This wasn’t an attempt at money, it was having to do the very thing that needed to be stopped, to prove it needed to be stopped.
The ethics of breeding heterozygous spiders however is a separate debate and really not one I wish to engage in at this moment. If you want to ask for my personal take on it, since the trials I have been moving spider out of my collection, however I have some dinker genes and other morphs tied up with the spider gene I am not willing to just write off. So I still currently at the moment breed them.
I will however address the misinformation you are spreading. I don’t know where you got your information from, but it is obviously not from experience.
heterozygous (regular) spiders do not come out at any higher deform rate than any other ball python. There is no evidence their condition causes pain. The wobble is the neurological issue, it’s not separate things. There is no kinking issue associated with the heterozygous spider.
I will say by the previous statement you are terribly misinformed about the spider gene, them existing doesn’t suggest anything criminal.
Actually spider is the most outcrossed morph in the entire hobby, with no visual super form being the rumor up until a couple years ago, there was no motivation to breed them in select groups. The opposite of what you are implying is what actually happened, hence the probably hundreds of thousands of them in captivity we have today. They all came from the single animal imported by NERD.
There hasn’t been a known correlation between the severity of the wobble and well… just about anything. They aren’t getting sicker or healthier, the gene is what it is. Again there is no evidence of pain. I want to say anthropomorphize, but I don’t think that quiet describes it correctly.
There is no evidence of pain, I described the point above. The super spider obviously doesn’t look pretty, they obviously don’t make money. Heterozygous spiders don’t even make money compared to just about any other morph. I think my motivation was clear.
I think you have been a bit misinformed about what exactly spider and wobble do.
Wobble, yes. other neurological issues, no. Kinking is not associated with spider at all.
Many neurological disorders are completely harmless or not very noticeable. For instance, I suffer from a minor tremor, chemical imbalances in my brain, and prosopagnosia but they do not affect my quality of life.
Neurological pain is indeed hell. However, there is no evidence that animals with wobble experience pain or discomfort due to the condition. There is a lot of evidence to support the opposite.
There are many, animals with wobble tend to be reliable eaters, breeders, and overall healthy animals. And yes, they are pretty, and they do sell well.
I don’t feel that you are qualified to state such an absolute. When working with reptiles you cant take your own feelings and emotions and apply them directly to the animal’s situation. They have very different brains than us and thinking along the lines of “I would feel bad if I lived like that” cannot directly translate to how the animal feels or how well the animal is cared for.
Matt has done some great work and made some solid points but I am going to lightly ante in here.
Like Matt, I have been trying to get the message of the lethal SuperSpider out for probably close to a decade. Likewise I have been trying to get people to understand that every Spider displays wobble/neuro. Without fail I have seen one constant when it comes to people denying either of these: Willful ignorance
The information is out there but people refuse to accept it because it does not agree with their personal narrative. And instead of taking the chance to learn, inevitably people will resort to attacking the messenger. I have lost track of the times Matt or myself or Nick Mutton or others like us have been called stupid, moron, idiot, arrogant, and other, not family friendly, words.
Hand in hand with this, we now have this latest trend of “ban Spiders” and it is, likewise, 100% based on willful ignorance. And we see that right here in this thread.
I find it amazing that the gene that is, arguable, the major driver behind the entire ball python morph game is also its single greatest bugbear
We did a spider X spider pairing once by mistake, and hatched out what we believed to be a super also. It hatched out fine, no defects well at least that we could see, and it lived for a bit. It died in his water bowl one night. I guess he went to get a drink and couldnt figure out how to get back out and drowned? Or thats just the spot he was at when he died. I dont have a clue. I will try to remember to attach a photo of him when I get home, If i still have it.
Very well said. The lethality of super spider has been known for a while but the physiological effects of wobble has not been properly studied. Currently, evidence shows that the condition does not affect the health or wellbeing of the animal except in rare cases where the wobble is extreme.
This is one reason people make a big deal about anthropomorphism. We do not have a clear window into the inner workings of an animal with wobble other than the way they display natural behaviors like eating, breeding, and resting. They do seem to have difficulty that would make them less likely to survive in the wild but that doesn’t affect their ability to thrive in captivity.
Attacking the messenger is a different story. I’ve been against using genes with wobble ever since I got my first spider. I have never been attacked when I spoke out against wobble using customer impression as a frame for documented information. I have seen many people, especially recently, who are very misinformed about how the condition affects the animal and I am quick to attack that misinformation.
I don’t work with any of the genes that produce wobble because of the negative impression that people get when their new pet starts twisting and wobbling. I do not believe it should be banned but I do believe that customers could be better informed of what is going on with their snake before they take it home.
hey so i am just trying to understand though that if the super spider is lethal , why breed spider x spider pairings ? I am just genuinely curious honestly.
Proper science. Evidence of it being lethal has been mostly single accounts of either eggs going bad during incubation or a single account of a white snake dying shortly after incubation. Part of research is verifying the results of an experiment and what @owalreptiles posted is a public verification that super spider is lethal. Now, anyone entering the hobby or starting a business will have solid proof that spider x spider should be avoided, not just word of mouth.
The biggest problem that I have with people making posts like this, is you have absolutely no clinical data to support any of your statements, and no long term interactive experience with the animals themselves.
Many of the things you claim as fact, you could disprove on your own with a little hands on experience. Instead you’ve chosen to stand behind ‘facts’ that are based on opinion and anecdotal evidence, not the type supported by clinical data.
You’re openly chastising us as a community, and our collective years of work with the gene, from the pedestal of your opinion. We actually know what the long term implications of the gene are, we see it every day, the suffering you depict in your rendition of the story just doesn’t happen.
No genetic issue in any species was ever resolved without research and experimentation. Many important issues however have been resolved by understanding the genetic properties of a similar dysfunction in other animals.
Assuming that we are all under some financial motivation is being a bit simple and again based on lack of knowledge of the market in this industry. If money were the motivating factor, we would all have moved on long ago. Every lost embryo is lost profit by that implication and so why would any of us waste even one egg that could easily present monetary value with very little risk of loss?
I have one adult female bumblebee het clown adult. I got her from a buddy getting out of BPs. She’s a sweetheart my daughter loves. I don’t breed her anymore because I just don’t care for spider, or pinstripe for that matter. Those 2 genes just ruin everything they touch IMO. But she doesn’t seem to be in pain. She has a wobble, and corkscrews a little when my daughter handles her. But she seems to enjoy getting out and interacting with her environment. There is a lot of genes that can cause wobble but don’t seem to get “slammed” in the hobby. If they were in extreme pain and didn’t want to thrive…they wouldn’t and there wouldn’t be very many spiders
I’ve been reading on this subject for a while now , I have a few questions
What other method of incubation has been tried with the spider x spider breeding
example Maternal incubation where mothers usually incubate 85-87f and control the humidity themselves . This method usually takes longer for babies to PIP approx 70 days . The mother will not cut the eggs so there a plus
If we look at Artificial incubation most temps are set higher along with humidity, leading the babies to hatch out at 60 days … some cutting the eggs at 50 days but that leaves the question as to are these babies ready or would they benefit from those extra days ?
Those breeders doing this spider x spider project are not neglectful instead I find it to be something that can maybe help us crack the genetic code to breeding snakes.
I own a cinnbee yb and a killer bee both do not show any signs of wobble and eat very well .So will I persue this study and learn more on how to crack this code of genetics . Hell yeah and will have all the data necessary to prove this project wrong if that is the case . I will be doing both types of incubation and see what results are I may get hate and many haters but im doing this for my own knowledge as I hate when ppl say something is lethal with out testing all outcomes
Im one of those because so far the only incubation manner done has been artificial and based on generic temps used for all other genetics .
So i will be testing both theories and see what data I can come up with … I will also be working closely with my exotic vet in my area as shes very interested in this subject
