Super Tessera
 

Thought I'd post a few pictures of the only, I believe, super tessera to date. The story on this guy is that he was produced by Graham Criglow and subsequently acquired by Don Shores. Don bred it to a single female the first year and produced 16 out of 16 tesseras. In the second year he bred it to two females and produced 30 out of 30 tesseras.

If you look at the snake's side pattern it is much more "faded out" than a regular tessera. It is quite odd that there haven't been more of these popping up, although the tessera morph is still relatively new, and it's possible that people could actually have a super version and not even realize it.

This male was acquired by Vin Russo from Don this past summer. We have a number of females to breed to him this season - a fire stripe, striped blood, peppermint, ultramel, okeetee, and one or two more. He certainly will be quite busy in a few weeks.

Thanks for looking!
Rich Hume

Gorgeous!!!

Awesome looking snake! I had read somewhere a long time ago that super tessera was thought to be lethal. Never really looked into it much after that but clearly that is not the case.

That's awesome. It makes sense that there is a super form. Just as I believe there is a super form of many co-dominant morphs, it's just not visual sometimes. I had (and also read about someone else who had) a spider ball python that looked visually the same but when bred to a normal all 3 times every egg was a spider, could be luck, but I think it wasn't. Good luck with your projects

I'm working on producing my own "supers" right now. If you figure out any determining characteristics as to what is super and what isn't, I'd love to know.

Best of luck!

Great looking addition Rich!

Was this was from the original tess x Tess breeding? I have some that will be tested from Tess x Tess breeding's. Is the super het?

great looking snake with awesome genetics.

Neat, kinda like the snake has the Midas Touch ;)

Tess X Tess = a "super" Tess is a good question, would have to think it was the case...?

Erm .... Total noob question here, but .... What exactly is a "super" tessera? Also, what about the super tess gene was supposed to be lethal?
Thanks for helping!

-- Kaifyre

Tessera is a dominant gene respective to normal pattern. Any phenotypic tessera will have at least one Tessera allele. Any tessera with one tessera allele bred to any non tessera will produce a clutch that is half tessera and half not. Super means that it has two dominant tessera alleles and a possible third phenotype (tessera that looks slightly different). This also means that a super tessera bred to a non tessera will produce 100% tessera offspring.

The article I had read was a little old but speculated that there weren't very many super tesseras (homozygous for tessera) because having two tessera alleles would kill the snake during incubation inside of the egg. Seeing Richard's snake says, to me, that the article I had read is incorrect.

Wow- Glad that snake is doing well for you Rich! It was always one of my favorites but I let Don Shores get it in trade years back.

It was from the first clutch of Tesseras that were produced by KJ & I. It was from the original 1.1 (of the original 2.1 group). The clutch consisted of normals, tesseras and this striped animal (there was also a couple- 2 if I remember correct- of weird looking motley "things" too). I'm guessing the original Tesseras carried the motley/stripe gene(s). We didn't know what to think about this animal---no one had ever seen a tessera with no side patterning (like the regular tesseras). Don Soderberg had produced Tesseras the year prior but since he only had the other original male and was outcrossing him to his animals, any recessive gene(s) that may/may not have been in the original animals didn't show up since Don bred his male to an Okeetee female(s) the first year (to the best of my knowledge--I could be wrong). I wholesaled the strange looking motley animals to a pet store (darn I wish I would have kept them--and I didn't take pics of them--- they just looked different than other motley animals I've seen).

The adults are not gone to different breeders... Don Soderberg has 1 of the original males, I sold the orther original male to a European breeder and my friend Dave Partington has the original female.

Sorry for the quick/jumbled response. I have 15 minutes to eat beakfest and leave the house before I'm late this morning. Figured I'd share what I remembered off the top of my head. Below are a few pics of that animal as a neonate!!!

Enjoy,
Graham

Thanks for sharing Rich.

Graham, so when original Tess X original Tess were paired,
did they still come out @ 50% normal/wildtype; 50% Tess?
SRL hatched out some Motley Tess last year.
Here:
http://www.cornsnakes.com/forums/sho...&postcount=335

Thanks for sharing
dp

You're welcome Dave! I don't remember the exact ratio but yes, it was about 50/50 from the orig X orig pairing. The striped and/or motley genes in the originals should be expected---remember, the guy whom sold me the original animals was working on a striped okeetee project (so of course striped/motley genes would be in there). PLUS, in our hobby, wayyyyyy too many "striped" corns are sold that are actually striped motleys. In fact, last year I got a amazing pair of "striped" fires that arrived and were motley fires... its a pet peeve of mine that I wish people would understand. But I degress.

Dave, I hope you can do a breeding loan with SMR for a 2nd pairing of orig X orig. It'd be interesting to see the outcome. Like I mentioned above, we were all in a race to make morphs so we never did the breeding again.

I doubt I really cleared anything up- it's all just my own opinion/speculation.

Graham

A couple of clarifications. . . .
 

Graham, from all of us, thanks for ORIGINAL data on the Tesseras.

First, I believe that when the originator of this line said he bred a Striped corn to an Okeetee corn, he actually had a Striped Tessera (but obviously was unaware of the "Tessera" gene). It is much more likely that the four Tessera mutants he received from that original pairing were from the Striped mutant parent that was also Tessera vs. from the Tessera mutants to be spontaneously manifested from a Striped parent that was not Tessera. When I showed the pictures of my first brood of the F2s from the male you gave me to KJ, he suspected that the supremely-striped Tessera sibs were just Striped mutants that received the odd and collateral genetic jolt from the Tessera mutation. Since they not only had perfect stripes but also retained black margins on their striped pattern, I was convinced they were not single-recessive Striped mutants. As it turned out, they were indeed Striped AND Tessera, but it begs the question, "where were the non-Tessera Striped mutants in the first Tessera brood?". Since the first Tesseras hatched, each time I get pseudo-perfectly striped mutants, I guardedly call them Striped Tesseras, and dub only the ones with Black on them "Striped Tesseras". So far, that has worked out, but since some of the striped phenotypes in those broods would have to be Striped but NOT Tessera, we shouldn't call all Striped phenotype Tessera siblings Striped Tesseras.

Since we all seek markers for Tessera Homozygotes (aka: Super-Forms) it is noteworthy that the seemingly unique one you produced that is now in the possession of Vin Russo and Rich Hume has some lateral broken-striped markings that are not evident in most Striped Tesseras. Does this indicate that perhaps Homozygote Tesseras have those lateral markings and their Visual-Het Tessera counterparts do not? Shrugs???

Someone else in this thread (sorry not to recall who you are) said that Tessera inheritance has been demonstrated to be dominant to wild-type pattern. That is a text book explanation, but since there are so many other corn snake mutations out there, I prefer to say that the Tessera pattern is dominant to wild-type pattern AND non-Tessera mutants. I'm probably not articulating that properly, but since corns can presumably be both Motley AND Tessera, did the Motley pattern dominate or co-express with Tessera? That therefore begs the question, "is Stripe dominant to Tessera - since Striped Tesseras generally lack the classic lateral tessellated pattern?".

Everyone, please, share your thoughts, observations, or facts on these points.

Don

So (I'm probably going to sound stupid asking this, after reflection, but here goes) Tessera could have been out there "a while," but because Motley (and Stripe?) are dominant to Tessera, no one identified it as a new pattern until a Tessera individual who was _not_ Motley or Stripe became evident?

I wouldn't say that stripe is dominant respective to tessera. However, the motley/stripe gene does seem to affect the tessera patttern differently than the normal saddle pattern. As far as I've seen (just through passive research looking at people's photos) motley alters the dorsal stripes of tessera and stripe alters the lateral pattern. Since motley and stripe are incompletely dominant to each other it would not surprise me that tessera is within the same realm of genes.

With all the captive breeding and sheer numbers of corn snakes being generated it would make sense to me that tessera, like many other mutations, are recent mutations and not old genes that have been weeded out through natural selection. I guess that's an optimistic opinion because it means after any breeding year some new cool mutation could come about.

All that being said I'm just a guy who loves corn snakes and genetics. I do not have the 20+ years of breeding experience that many on this site do have.

If I remember correctly, tessera is on its own locus and not allelic to stripe/mot (as they are with each other); so I think, the question is if stripe or mot forces its appearance over the tessellation look (which we know happens).
Probably just to different degrees depending upon the quality of the genetic striping by both genes.

Beautiful corns. it's mental how much they look like top shelf miami motleys from LBR.

Here are my two lbr motleys
http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/u...ps4ad35085.jpg

http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/u...ps8832f12e.jpg

Super Tessera
 

Graham shared with me these pictures - to quote him these are "the original 1.1 breeders (Don S. had the other 1.0 original Tessera)...these are the animals that produced your super. That original Tessera X original Tessera breeding was only done once the first year before we started outcrossing them to other morphs."

As Graham stated earlier in this thread, that original 2.1 trio are all in separate hands at this point. These, along with Don's male, are the ones that started it all. Interesting that the super came out of the first year breeding, and none (at least that we know of) since.

The first three pictures are the female, the last two the male.

Rich Hume

Resurrecting the original thread on Super Tessera's.
I started a Tessera x Tessera project in 2015, and have been test breeding my holdbacks. This is my 3rd Tessera from that clutch being tested, and I believe he is a Super.
I paired him with my LBR Miami female, and so far, all of the babies are Tessera's. Eight babies have pipped (all Tessera's), and I'm waiting on the last two to pip.

A few years ago a couple of us started looking into possible markers for Super Tessera's, and didn't see any obvious ones. I was pretty sure there were known Supers that didn't have perfect/near perfect dorsal stripes, but now I'm only seeing perfect/near perfect stripes on the known Supers.
I will be breeding my male to a different female next year to make sure he's producing 100% Tessera's.

Congrats!

Thank you!! All 10 babies in this clutch are Tessera's. :)

Stupid question but is the super tessera passed down to the babies or are they just normal tesseras?

No, the babies from a Super Tessera are regular Tessera's (visual het).

Isn't it an "Incomplete Dominant" if something has a super form? I'm slightly confused why the term co-dominant is used to identify these mutations. Anyone care to explain?

Super in this case only refers to the fact that the snake has 2 copies of the gene. Tessera is just plain dominant.

Here's the thing. There aren't any known markers on the Homo Tessera's, it's a dominant gene, so "Super" is not the appropriate term, but this is what everyone has called them since it was discovered.

It's one of the things I was hoping to figure out with my Tessera X Tessera project. (Possibly finding a marker on the HD Tessera's.)

I started calling them HD (homo dominant) due to the absence of known markers for the "Super" form, but to most people, they call them Supers. Apparently a lot of people are opposed to calling them "Homo Tessera's". LOL


HERE is a thread where Amanda (Tavia) discovered her Tessera was HD/Super in 2015. Unfortunately, the picture site started charging money, and the photos are not visible anymore.


I will be doing more with this, in hopes of figuring out more.