Charcoal / Pewter: brown-free and dark?

In this post I would like to discuss with you a bit about why some Charcoal / Pewter Cornsnakes have Brown color components and others do not.

Since Charcoal is my favorite mutation, there are many hom. Charcoals in my stock and I already had quite a few Charcoal / Pewter hatchlings.

One of the main goals of my breeding is to breed a Pewter Corn Snake as dark and low contrast as possible, which does not show brown color parts.

Especially with hatchlings, I think it is hard to predict how they will develop color-wise. Because especially in the young age the saddle spots appear partly still deep black and show only with increasing age and the hereby often connected lightening brown color parts. Whereby I could also determine that some animals seem to become darker with increasing age.

To allow a comparability of the animals, I have selected exclusively pictures of adult animals. They illustrate quite well the differences described by me.

The first two pictures show two Sunkissed Pewter females (siblings), which do not show any brown color parts. Especially the darker female shows in which direction my Pewter projects should develop.

The other pictures show Pewter Cornsnakes from my stock, which show these described unwanted brown color parts.

A mating between the dark, brown-free Sunkissed Pewter female and a Bloodred Striped het. Charcoal male produced hatchlings that unfortunately already show brown color parts at a young age.

For this reason I wonder if it would not make more sense to mate the brown-free dark Sunkissed Pewter female with a dark Bloodred male that does NOT het. Charcoal?

Back to my questions, what ensures that Charcoal / Pewter corn snakes do NOT have brown coloration? And what makes Charcoal / Pewter corn snakes have a dark phenotype?

What are your thoughts? To allow for as unbiased a discussion as possible, I'll hold off on my thoughts for now.

Sunkissed + charcoal seems to just make for really nice, dark animals. My sunkissed charcoal is also a very nice true gray and black, but her charcoal offspring were all brown.
That said, my charcoal line (often brown) did throw a very nice animal that lacked the brown pigment on maturity. I sadly lost that individual, but her younger full sibling is looking to be her equal in the long term.

Shiari said:

Sunkissed + charcoal seems to just make for really nice, dark animals. My sunkissed charcoal is also a very nice true gray and black, but her charcoal offspring were all brown.
That said, my charcoal line (often brown) did throw a very nice animal that lacked the brown pigment on maturity. I sadly lost that individual, but her younger full sibling is looking to be her equal in the long term.

Click to expand...

I read your thread on your dark charcoals! Really very beautiful animals!

Do you have a picture of your Sunkissed Charcoal?

From the mating between my beautiful dark Sunkissed Pewter female and a Bloodred Striped het. Charcoal male I have 4.3 Pewter het. Sunkissed, Striped and 0.2 Pied Sided Bloodred het. Sunkissed, Charcoal, Striped kept.

I find your suggestion that an additional hom. sunkissed affects the brown pigments of Charcoals and leads to a clean gray/black phenotype very interesting and exciting.

If your theory were confirmed, I would have brown-free Sunkissed Pewter Stripeds in 2-3 years. That would be great!

Further, I wonder what leads to a dark phenotype. Especially since an additional hom. sunkissed means that a hypomelanistic gene is involved, which actually has a lightening effect. Following the explanations of Joe Pierce, Redcoat could possibly play a role in this context.

This is my girl Raka. Unfortunately I only got the one clutch out of her as it took so much out of her that she required 2 years to recover her condition. So I retired her.
Her ground color is light, but the saddles are dark and there's not a hint of brown anywhere.