operatic-exotics

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sticky.dogs on ig

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True story https://www.instagram.com/p/CBrURrXsW5F/?igshid=8k6qx1qqdi8t

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Bad reptile breeder alerts; cw: racism, ableism, violence against POC

Lee Hingle of Hingles Herps

Brent Thomas of Ball-Mart

Both made disparaging racist AND ableist comments today against our boi Mark Cole. Mark Cole is deaf. I dont have the racism screens cuz guess who blocked me.

Lockdown Morphs aka Brian Towe; this was completely out of the blue to one of my followers.

Palm Beach exotics aka Patrick Seadorf:

Ill keep updating this as these people reveal themselves. Stay safe reptiblr.

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Hmmm

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she’s got such a chunky head compared to all my other bps

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Took a quick pic while cleaning little ‘Misu! I love her white sides. She is SO pretty and delicately colored, I adore her so much. She’s a real sweetheart too.

Python brongersmai

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Oatmeal

Do not repost

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A story of determination

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Since people were already interested, this is her!! These are the photos from the breeder, not ones I’ve taken–I’m on a 12 day work trip so am waiting to have her shipped until after I return. She is a Guyanese BCC born August 2nd of this year :) She’s already starting to show a lot of pink color on her sides & face, she’s gonna be beautiful!! 

I’ll post again once I have received her :) Until then, I now return to your regularly scheduled dragon art.

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Devo, 2017 Pucallpa Peru Boa constrictor

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Man, my collection was really missing a visual albino! Of course, being me, I couldn’t settle for just any albino, oh no - this is a 2016 Purple Sharp girl from European blood (thank you Chroma Constrictors!). Her colors and contrast are already impressive, I can’t wait to see how she develops! 

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Weaver, 2017 Sharp Sunglow Jungle (Boa imperator)

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she’s a pretty snake

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How can he be both majestic and a huge goof at the same time??

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finally... am enchi elitist again

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Legitimate question because I'm interested in reptile breeding (not for profit, I'll probably keep most of the babies) how do you make sure you aren't inbreeding? Do you keep charts? Do you screen for genetics like mammal breeders? Just curious

Ive been trying to find out where to start on this basically all day. I feels like theres so much i have to infodump to explain my decisions.

Tl; dr: i do not consciously pair related animals, except in one circumstance- i will explain below.

Keeping in mind that my explanations are very heavily centered on the ball python breeding community, here's the background:

Nearly no one keeps track of parentage in ball pythons because it is seen as unimportant. This is due to some different factors:

The belief that heritable issues are very rare, even with inbreeding, and past experience has shown inbreeding doesn't really cause issues.

The belief that few things other than morph (color/pattern) are inheritable (ie. Many breeders do not consider temperment to pass on)

And, from my view point, it's to hide inbreeding, because even though its not looked down upon in general, we do know it tends to make less fit animals, and has the potential to create problems, even if they are rare.

Moreso the 1st than the others.

As far as I know there isnt any kind of genetic screening available for pythons, certainly not anything affordable and accessible 😭 theyre still working on the kinks for ball pythons, though i hear corn snakes are coming along nicely for that and its been expanded for many colubrids. They can take sheds and evaluate for morph based on parents iirc.

Personally, i don't have to keep track of lineage in any formal way because i have so few. I only have 17 ball pythons, two of which are related males, and two of which are nonbreeding/pet only males. That leaves me with no potential for inbreeding, unless i was to do something weird with the offspring of the related males, which isnt necessary or part of my breeding goals. When i start breeding the same male to multiple females, i will certainly keep better track, but its not really that urgent because the breeding males i have dont have many morphs that overlap, again aside from the related males.

Even though it isn't necessarily seen as problematic, i just cant justify inbreeding. The circumstances people typically inbreed are as such:

They dont see a problem with it, therefore it isnt unethical- for me, i am aware of the potential harm it can cause.

No one else is working on the recessive project they have, so they cannot find mates to breed with their snakes- i ended up with 2 breeding pairs because i really wanted to avoid inbreeding

They want to save money, so making a clutch and pairing a brother and sister is cheaper than buying a whole snake, typically- doing things in line with my ethics is more important to me than saving a bit of cash.

Theyre working to prove out a gene. This is where my exception comes in.

When trying to prove a new morph out, in order to have it accepted as a morph by the bp population, eventually you're gonna have to breed it back to its parent.

Take Whiskey for example.

She is an imported ball python. Her mom was roaming Africa, got caught, laid eggs, got released, and those eggs were incubated, and Whiskey popped out. Because she is not from a known captive animal, despite the fact she looks almost identical to mahogany, I cannot call her that. I will need to prove her out to make sure her pattern and color are not simply flukes, that it produces the same effect as mahogany, and that pairing her with a mahogany creates homozygous mahoganies.

Here's how most people do it:

Take the import, and breed it to a recessive gene or a normal. This will enable any offspring to be readily identifiable as similar or dissimilar to the parent. It will also prevent other morphs from interfering with the look of the individuals.

Hold back an offspring of the opposite sex to grow out, preferably one that looks like the import parent. However, if no offspring look like the parent, it could be a recessive gene, so a normal may be necessary to hold back.

Pair the offspring to the parent, await results. You get babies that look like the import, congrats you have a new morph.

Now, sinxe Whiskey looks so similar to some lines of the mahogany morph, and because some folks said she could possibly be a chocolate, i made a different move to prove her out, to hopefully avoid inbreeding through the usual procedure. I bought a chocolate mahogany male. If the offspring look like super mahoganies or super chocolates, then i have a very clewr answer. And if not, then I'll likely just have to hold back a male offspring that looks like Whiskey and breed her to him. 🤷‍♀️ there isnt really a different way to avoid inbreeding in the case of proving out new morphs.

Does this answer the question? XD

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ah….. that’s my boy