Major Surprise Hatchling

My luck with ambers is absolutely horrible. Every one I buy, even het ambers, dies before being old enough to breed. The only exceptions have been 2 males (a normal and an amel) I kept from breeding a ghost to a butter, and a female caramel het amber I bought from Rich way back in early '99 (a '98 hatchling). This female has always been unthrifty, a sporadic feeder and underweight. I was finalyy able to get her up to breeding weight this spring and bred her to my normal het amel, anery, caramel, hypo male. She laid 9 good eggs but, unfortunately, didn't recover from laying and died 3 weeks later. 1 egg went bad, but the remaining 8 started pipping last night. Now for the surprise(s).

I always assume a snake is only het for what I'm told. Therefore, I was expecting normal, hypo, caramel and amber hatchlings. Last night, I saw a hypo, a normal, and an AMEL! OK, the female was also het butter...nice surprise. But this morning, 3 more had pipped and I saw another amel, a dark hatchling (couldn't tell if normal or caramel) and a SNOW! DANG! The female was het amel, anery and hypo! THAT throws a big monkey wrench into my calculations! My chances of an amber hatchling just went from 1/8 to about 1/14! I still have 3 eggs to pip, so I'm not giving up yet. And that dark, unidentified hatchling could also be an anery. At least the snow seems to have some interesting color to it's head...maybe homo caramel? Sorry, the pic isn't the best.

LOL

I guess that your luck really isn't with the ambers..
mine isn't really with the lavenders....but still this year I got some decent clutches~

Hope that an amber will pop out from your few remaining eggs~~!!

Good luck Susan! I hope you get what you're looking for. I have to hand it to you all, it takes such patience and good management of these projects! I still can't get my hands wrapped around the genetics. Oh well. Hey how's that ziggy doing that I was eyeing? Are they feeding well? Take care.

I think that stinks that there are genes in there that you dont know about. Suppose you dont want Anerythristic in your projects? Then what? I personally would never intenionally not disclose what a snake is Het for. Thats just bad business. Best of luck with them though.

All but one egg has fully hatched and I'm really thinking that the odd-ball "snows" may actually be very light butters! I've got 2 normals, 1 caramel, 2 hypos (although 1 looks almost like an amber - could be a hypo het caramel), 1 amel, and 2 butters(?). I'm happy with the results and plan on keeping most, if not all, of this clutch, just to see what they all look like when they grow up.