Tessera market

knox - Personally, it's not that I prefer stripes, I just like them too. Also, the patterning, I like the patterning that shows up on Tesseras.

And yes, I don't doubt that the snakes are worth the asking price, I just can't afford them.

Originally Posted by Pugsley

knox - Personally, it's not that I prefer stripes, I just like them too. Also, the patterning, I like the patterning that shows up on Tesseras.

And yes, I don't doubt that the snakes are worth the asking price, I just can't afford them.

Worth is definitely in the eyes of the purchaser. If someone is willing to pay $500 for a snake, the snake is worth $500 to that person.

Nothing wrong with that at all. If someone is happy with the purchase of their snake, that's all that matters.

Last year, when the Tesseras were all the rage, I found it odd. Again, this is just me, and I mean no offense to anyone. I just didn't see why people were paying over $1,000 for a snake I would pass over for a nice Abbott Okeetee for $40.

Thankfully for the snake industry, consumers have different tastes.

However, there does seem to be a definite lull in sales across the board. The boom of 3 - 10 years ago seems to be gone. Could be the economy, could be market saturation. But things have definitely changed.

Most of the Cornsnakes morphs are recessive... true.
But very few snakes out there are capable of breeding at 2.5 years of age, let alone yield such a high fertility rate...

Take BP's and Boas... you can check out Boid threads...
The breeding trials are long, extensive, with a fair chance of complication to the parents(due to the effort it takes for them to court and breed for so long)... heck, I personally witnessed a high rate of pairs that copulated and yielded no young...

With Boas it's sometimes even worst... because a pregnancy with allot of slugs is very difficult on the female and her health can seriously go under during or often delivering them.

It's simpler and easier for corns... and they bring significant clutches to the table(sometimes even double clutching).

It's not just Corns though... as a rule of thumb, most colubrids that enjoy the same fertility rate are sold at significantly less than Boids usually do.

Add to that the fact that Corns are local animals in the US- it is easier to find, obtain and enrich the gene pool than it is to import from Aftica for instance.

If I fairly compare the costs, effort, and risk a breeder takes when purchasing high end boids and breeding them to Corns... I have to say, the Boid breeder is rolling higher numbers and risks....

Rest assured though, price drops are visible in BP's as well as Boids...

5 years ago, a Bumblebee would cost 15000 $ easy... now it's 150-300$.

Boas... morphs that came out a year ago are now significantly cheaper and so forth...

You have tons of breeders working on a finite' numbrt of projects... the supply rises significantly every year...

In short... a BP with even a co/dom trait will yield 1/6 of the potential amount of offspring as a Corn would... with a far higher chance of the breeding trials to go wrong.

Add the tendency to hunger strike which can set things back...

It's simply not the same, it isn't.

And that's 2.5 years for females btw.

Gartersnake says "Hi!! Wait till you see my Okeetee babies in 2013!!"

Nice picture Nanci. He is coming along really well!

First, I'd like to apologize to everyone for the stupid bickering I got in with another forum member when this thread was new and productive. While I didn't mean to hijack the thread with the bickering, that's in fact what happened...so for that I'm sorry.

The only reason I pursued the hybrid talk the way I did was because of the following comment the OP made on page 2:

Haha that's good Rich. I was reading about Tessera hybrid speculation on another forum. Maybe that is having an effect as well. I'm not saying it is, just making conversation!

But, enough hybrid talk.

As Nick's original post brought to our attention, yeah, the tessera market has definitely crashed. There's been so many good causal factors discussed that I thought I'd mention one more I see as an issue.

High-end offspring such as tessera are sold directly to our competition.

What I mean is that farmers that grow crops sell their crops to people that consume the product. People who buy computers buy the computer and use it for their own personal gain, but they don't use that computer to make more computers for resale. In the snake world things work so much differently. Everyone wants to be have the experience of breeding, and with corns that's relatively easy. Now, while maybe not everyone who buys a corn will try to reproduce someday, the one's that fall under this category are probably the ones buying low-end morphs as pets. However, if someone's going to drop $500, or even $200 on a snake, they're going to realistically try to recoup their investment by selling the offspring.

We also face the problem of breeders who produce too many offspring. Many dump them off at less than wholesale prices in a public forum, simply because they either lack the ability to feed and house the hatchlings for an extended period of time or they don't want to spend the time keeping them. I've seen many bloodred morphs this year up for sell for ludicrously low prices when just last year they were advertised for four times the value. While some of these morphs may be wholesale animals for some of the larger producers of corns those wholesale transactions remain behind closed doors and the public never sees the low sales prices. But, when it becomes public, and everyone see's lower than low prices for many morphs, then the market for those morphs will NEVER recover. Once someone sees something for $30 they'll never spend more than that because they know eventually someone will become frustrated by a lack of sales and post it for that price. The same is going that way for tesseras. Now BHB has then posted for $150. Even though we aren't told of any possible hets, buyers now know that they're in the reasonable price range and there's very, very, very few who will be up for paying much more.

So I guess because of bad pricing practices by many people selling corns, selling directly to our competition, dominant inheritance of the trait, and the economy being so jacked up...the tessera market may be forever hosed.

Oh well, it does suck, but I'm glad that the joy of working with snakes is my first and foremost concern...so it's not a loss for me. I hope that most of you are in the same boat. I'm sure we got into this hobby because it was just that, a hobby. We all love simply working with corns, and while we may not be able to make a lot of money back with the tessera morph, it's still awesome having them in our collection. For that, I'm very thankful and not in the least bit upset!

Mitch

Well said Mitch.

Originally Posted by Mitchell Mulks

However, if someone's going to drop $500, or even $200 on a snake, they're going to realistically try to recoup their investment by selling the offspring.

Or, in my case, use the $200-$500 snake as an ingredient in a future project, or just reproduce a morph that one loves in the first place. Take my avalanche stripe project for example. When I saw the first avalanche stripe, I HAD TO have it. I bought a bloodred stripe het snow to go with him, with the goal of making avalanche stripes. At the time, I knew of only one other. Jay and PJ bred one the following year, I believe. And Joe Pierce may have had a sibling.

The blood stripe turned out to be a male, foiling my plot. The next year, I was loaned a hypoblood het snow stripe, and bred my first avalanche stripe. I didn't make those babies, the av stripes and fire stripes and GBR stripe and hypo blood stripes to recoup money from the initial investment. I bred them for the joy of making more beautiful snakes. To me- seeing those gorgeous babies hatch out- finding homes for them with people who are thrilled to have them- seeing them mature into amazing adults because people from here have them and post updates- that's what it's all about.

Nanci, I can't WAIT to see your Okeetee babies!!!