A few more striped bloods

Another clutch of striped bloods have hatched which demonstrate a different pattern mutation than those previously posted earlier this month. Here are a few pics, plus a pic of a striped amel bloodred.

Nice~~

That amel striped blood kind of looks like a motley blood more
but heck what do I know.....you're the producer...

Awesome animals! I love that amel striped blood!

Nice Corns!

I don’t see Motley influence in all of them. It the beginning of time, when Striped Corns were first being developed, they looked like the bottom two photos.

Selective breeding has given us the perfect stripes we see today. A lot of breeders of Striped Corns do not post the partial stripers. They only post the best one or two in a clutch. I have actually seen people call partial Stripers, Motleys automatically that don‘t look like Motleys to me at all. Sometimes when Stripes are out crossed, we step back in time. A typical looking Motley is never produced from this type.

I don’t fully understand the Striped and Motley relationship, but a Partial Striped Corn does not automatically have Motley Blood in them. If you stretch out the pattern of the Corns in the bottom two photos you would have a perfect striper head to tail. I believe if you breed a Het Stripe/Motley together( Which is what they have to be if they are alleles), you will get Stripes, Motleys and something different than these guys in the same clutch. If you get Partial Stripes with a couple good Stripers, the parents are not Hets for Striped/Motley but genetic Stripes.

The top two photos do look suspicious to me, only because the striping does not have even edges. You really have to see the entire clutch to make any kind of call.

Cool stuff. Thanks for the pics and keep them coming, especially as they continue to grow. I gotta get around to posting some of those I took at Daytona.

Simon, I also have a striped corn that has no striping on her and has that "cubed" pattern. (Egh, I can't believe I have a striped corn! But she'll prove useful in making striped/motley Opals, hehe.)

I think it's great when pics of these cutting edge snakes get posted. We all imagine what they will look like but that isn't always what we get. The more we see, the more we're able to hypothisize.


Thanks Richard!

Striped Bloodreds

I was lucky enough to see some of Richard's striped bloodreds in person at the Daytona show. It was fun talking to him too. Thanks for posting more photos Richard.
Frank Pinello

Here's one of them we got to see at Daytona. He had a bunch of clutchmates and the differences between the "striped corns" and what look to be the "striped bloods" were pretty dramatic.

wow stunning i have anery bloods and bloods and hoping put striped lavs through there to get lav stripe bloods and anery lav stripe bloods, well that is the plan gulp!

Joe, acording to the book "A color guide to corn snakes" . The first sriped corns were produced in 1985. The book was published six years later in 1991. There are five pictures of srtiped corns. all five are nearly perfectly striped.The pictures include a snow,amel and an anery stripe. A sriped corn would likely have been bred to a snow and the pictured corns are probably only second generation stripes produced from hets with very little or any selective breeding for perfect striping.From the same book "a small fraction of individuals carrying the striping trait will have some dorsal blotches present in the form of thin hourglass shapes connecting the two dorsal stripes". Are you sure that your original breeding stock wasn't part of a small fraction? Not trying to give you a hard time. I went and looked in that book after reading your comments on the early stripes. Personaly , I like many of the ones with some blotching.

Stripes vs. Motleys: My experiece with them.

The relationship between Striped Corns and Motley Corns is not fully understood. I know that I do not completely understand the two genes relationship and I am not so sure anybody else does either. Are they different genes that are located on the same locus, or are they the same gene? Are there any secondary recessive genes that make the two look different? What do Hets for Motley and Striped look like if we go with the allele theory? Can pure Motleys have striping? Can pure Striped Corns have broken stripes? What is a “Cubed” Corn? What does Striped Motley mean to you? I am sure that it means something different to me than most at this time.

I have a lot of experience breeding Motley Corns and quite a bit breeding Striped Corns as well. I began breeding Corns in 1982, so I saw the Motleys and Striped come on the scene in the Corn Snake World. Unfortunately, my memory is not perfect, but for the most part Striped Corns and Motley Corns were sold as different genetic traits and bred to the same genetic morph most of the time as far as anybody knew. If somebody mixed the two, how would anybody know several generations later, since they have been around for close to 20 years. A better question would be: If Stripes and Motleys are different genetic traits, it should be easy to isolate each one out with test breeding, but it doesn‘t seem to be that easy? Double hets for Motley and Striped X Double hets for Motley and Striped should produce 25% Motley, 25% Stripes and 50% Double Hets for Motley and Striped. Is this what happens?

My first disagreement with most thinking these days is that a Motley with Striping is actually a product of a Striped X Motley breeding that would in fact be a double het for Striped and Motley, if we subscribe to the allele theory. When I first started breeding Motleys along with many other breeders, we began to see a few small connected blotches of dorsal pattern that we all thought was pretty cool. The rest of the snake looked very Motley like. These small sections of striping were thin and usually had irregular edges. Of course, we all saved these partial striped Motleys and as time went on, selective breeding produced more and more Motleys that had dorsal striping. Four Line Striped Corns were never produced from these Striped Motleys and eventually, fully Striped Motleys were produced which had nothing to do with the Striped gene at all. I produce a lot of Motleys that have dorsal striping these days because I have been selectively breeding for that trait for many generations and it has nothing to do with the Striped gene at all. The stripe is narrow and usually has irregular edges, but not always. I have produced some Snow Motleys with a perfect thin dorsal stripe down their back that was not irregular and looked very much like a perfectly striped Amel California King Snake. Why does almost everybody who sees a Motley with dorsal striping these days, automatically think they are a double Het for Motley and Striped? Pure Motleys can and do have dorsal striping that is a product of selective breeding, however it acts much more like breeding Aztecs. It is not predictable. If any one of the breeders has some striping, many of the offspring can have striping or almost none at all. Fully Striped Motleys bred to the same will produce some completely normal Motleys, but generally many more of the clutch will have striping.

I have been producing quite a few Striped Corns over the last few years. I have to agree with most writings that I have seen that a fully striped Corn is fairly rare. I only get a few in each clutch. Most of the clutch is half striped, or fully striped with broken stripes and some with the odd looking “Cubed” Pattern. Many only have a hint of striping on the neck which fades into a pattern less snake. The Amel Striped Bloodred at the beginning of this post looks to me to be a Genetic Striped Corn that starts out with good striping and then begins to break up and has the Cubed pattern towards the tail, but it looked like a Motley to someone else and others probably as well, but why. The Stripe is not narrow and has regular edges. The blotching on the lower half of the snake does not resemble the pattern on a Motley Corn does it? If the stripe on the first part of the snake connected and continued down the back, it would be a fully striped Corn. We see a lot of photos of very nicely striped Corns, but are they the select few or is the entire clutch fully striped like the ones in the photos?

The Motleys and Striped Corns in my collection were bought as pure genetic types. I have produced some Motleys with dorsal striping and patted myself on the back for my efforts, but it was due to selective breeding. I have never produced a Four Lined Striped looking Corn from my Motley line. I have produced a lot of clutches of Striped Corns, but I can’t remember one that was a full clutch of fully Striped Corns. Most were partially striped or near pattern less and some looked like the “Cubed” Corns. I have never produced a corn from my Striped Corns that looked like a typical Motley Corn to me, not one.

I have bred Striped X Motley and the results were very surprising to me. I still have a few of these females that bred for the first time for me this year. I bred them to Motleys and typical Motley babies were produced. The breeding that produced these females was an Amel Striped X Motley het amel. The results were 25% Amel Motleys, 25% Motleys and 50% Amels and Normals. Yes normals! I have no idea why. Not one of the Motleys had any striping at all. The babies that I produced from these girls this year are plain old boring Motleys and nothing more. Are “Cubed” Corns a result of a Motley X Striped breeding? I have seen the “Cubed” Corns listed as “Cubed” Motley Corns, but I have never produced a single “Cubed” Corn from my Motley line. I have produced “Cubed” Corns from my Striped line, but not one Motley. In my opinion, the “Cubed” Corns are a product coming from the Striped line and not the Motley line, but I suppose if the two were mixed you could get “Cubed” Corns from Motley looking breeders.

Here are all of the photos that I have of the Striped Amel Corn that I used to start my Striped Lavender Project with. I sold him to a wholesaler last year because he was getting old. I bred him to a Lavender Corn that turned out to be het for Amel which I bought from Tim Rainwater, which produced Normals het for Striped Opal and Amels het for Striped Opal. I bought him from Lloyd Lemke in 1990 as an Amel Striped Corn. He had the most complete striping of any that Lloyd had at the show at the time. As a hatchling, his striping was very good on the first half of his body, but faded to mostly pattern less towards the tail with random areas of blotching.

I found a couple more of the old man.

Here are a few of the Amel Striped Males offspring. They were produced by breeding him to other Striped Corns. Most of the clutches that they came from consisted of partially striped Corns, but none resembled Motleys to me. They were my picks of the litters that I saved back and bred them to Striped Lavenders this year.

These first two photos are Motleys with dorsal striping that I produced here from my Motley line. They do not have any Striped blood in them. The second two photos are of Motleys with dorsal striping from other breeders. The Butter Motley in the comparison photos I produced here, but it was produced from Pure Motley Butters. The last photo is of a Lavender Motley that has dorsal striping which I bought. I believe they are all pure Motleys with dorsal striping.

We have always referred to the Motleys with dorsal Striping as Striped Motleys in the past, but this has taken on a new meaning lately. So what should the Pure Motleys with dorsal striping be called? They are not a mixture of the two lines.

What are “Cubed” Corns? I produced these from pure Striped Lines. These are old photos from last year. I need to get some new photos taken. I have produced a few of this type this year that are stunning. They have basically one light pastel colored back ground with blotching on them. Some “Cubed” and some large oval blotching. I do not think they are a result of a mixture of the Motley and Striped lines, but something contained with in in the Genetic Striped line.

Personally I think that motley and stripe ARE alleles or else very very very closely linked (which amounts to about the same difference with a rare/occasional non-motley/stripe popping up once in a great while), but I think that as you pointed out, Joe, that there are many motleys that show striping without the "stripe" gene at all. There are also those cubed motelys which I feel are just a variant of stripe that I don't think have the "motley" gene at all. When you combine motley and stripe, you get a mix-mash of some crazy-looking motleys, but you don't get normals, you don't get any non-stripe/non-motley corns. I think the difficulty in breeding stripe x motley, then trying to recover stripe, is that people expect to get "perfect" stripes. I also think there is enough overlap that, much like with anerys and ghosts, that you may not be able to tell which ones are het for motley/stripe and which are just closer-to-the-middle-ground motleys or stripes.

I think the perfect stripe is a result of selection for best patterns amongst the striped gene corns. Selection away from that weird cubed stretched out wide pattern and towards the clean stripe. It would make sense, then, that when you breed a clean stripe to a motley, then cross the f1's that you don't get clean stripes. The selection has been lost. It would be like crossing an Okeetee to a Miami and wondering in the F2 why no perfect Okeetees popped out. I think those thin striped "striped-motleys" are a variant of motley.

To be honest, the stripe gene does nothing for me, nor does the "cubed motley" version of the gene. Personal tastes. I think motleys and "motley-stripes" rock on, though. Unfortunately, what this means is that I am going to have to mostly rely on people like you, Joe, to supply more input in this saga.

Great pictures, you contribute a ton of great information to this forum. Keep 'em coming...oh, and how about some updated pics of those lava lavenders.

Here are some photos of the Amel Striped X Motley Het Amel offspring that I held onto if anybody is curious. I sent these photos to Serp because I thought they were basically more normal patterned than Motley patterned, but he thought they were typical Motleys. I wish I would have saved some of the normally colored Motleys from this breeding. They were very striking. They had a light tan back ground color with milk chocolate blotching. I guess old habits made me hold onto the amels over the normals colored ones.

Notice that they have no striping at all which is opposite from what most people would expect from a Striped X Motley breeding.

Hurley said:

To be honest, the stripe gene does nothing for me, nor does the "cubed motley" version of the gene.

Click to expand...

This has always bewildered me. Why is a “Cubed” Corn from the Striped Line called a “Cubed” Motley? Perhaps they may look more "Motley like", but mine are not from the Motley line, but the Striped line.

I will post up dated Lava Lavender photos soon. They are both eatting like pigs and growing fast. I was hoping to have more photos to post from the second clutch from the first female, but there were only Ice, Lavenders, Lava, Anery and normals in the clutch. One more clutch to go and it is due on the 21st.

Heh, yeah, it's a misnomer...like I said, I think "cubed motleys" are stripes.

Too bad on that clutch giving you everything BUT lava lavs. Isn't that just the way it goes, thanks Murphy.

I can't keep up with you guys but I'm wondering if you might have any thoughts for me on my stiped x motley breeding.
I breed a classic looking motley to a classic looking striped corn. Here's what I got. At least 13(can't remember the total clutch size) that were motley looking for the most part, but some thin stripping on the sides. 1 normal corn and 1 almost perfectly striped motley stripe, the type with perfect borders. It was dramaticly different then the motley looking corns in the clutch.
Another note: the quote from the book I used supports your argument that the cubed pattern is from the stripes, since stripes were still new then and probably were not breed to motleys that early. I am asuming that the hour glass blothes they refered to are the same as the ones we see in the cubed "motleys" today.

Can we see some pictures?

I see that you got a normal as I did which should not happen with the allele theory. I don't remember the exact size of my clutch either, but it was around 16 hatchlings and about 8 were of the normal pattern. The female that I used was imported from Europe, so perhaps she carried a different gene from Motley or Striped and was only het for one or the other. I know somebody who had a Striped Okeetee pop up from supposed pure Okeetee lines, so are there other genes similar to the Motley or Striped genes that have yet to be discovered?

I guess we could always blame it on retained sperm. I have never been a big believer in retained sperm, but this year when I switched males for the second clutches, most of the hatchlings that were produced from the second clutch were from the first male. She was an adult when I bought her, but I bought her in mid year and cycled her with the rest of my snakes.

Most Motleys have thin striping on their sides. Most Stripes have more complete striping on there sides. I have produced a few Motleys like the one you describe with a perfect thin stripe down the back like a Cal King.

I think with the variability within the Striped and Motley morphs, it will be very difficult to distinguish between odd pure lines and the crossed lines, especially when we are breeding Motleys or Stripes that we have just purchased. How are we supposed to know if our "Classic" looking Motley and "Classic" looking Striped are of the pure genetic lines? We can ask, but how does the breeder who produced them know the same question? Your perfect Striped Motley, may be a pure Motley, if it has a single stripe or a pure Striped Corn if it has stripes on the side. It is very possible that one of your breeders was of the pure genetic type and the other was a double het. I am not saying that this is the case with your snakes, but it is very possible for this to happen to anybody. The question is, does it really matter?

I am fairly certain that my Motley and Striped Lines are pure, but how do I know that the breeders who produced them, even way back when did not cross the two lines? I would think by now that I would have seen obvious signs if some Double hets were in the group. I have added a few Motleys to my colony in the last few years and a few Stripes as well. They looked to be of the "Classic" Types, but these days, who can know for sure.

I added Lavender Motleys, Butter Motleys and Anery A Stripes which I did not have. They looked to be of the classic types when I bought them so I will treat them as such. I produced some Butter Motleys from the ones that I bought that had dorsal striping last year and this year, and the Anery A Striped produced some very nice Stripes het for Snow when bred to an Amel Striped last year as well. She got a dose of Ice this year. Boy, I can not wait for babies from them to hatch in a couple of years!