Tesseras or hybrids

[Kokopelli]

No, please don't hang me... I am not trying to stir any pots.
Israel, as some of you might have heard from me by now, is dependent on irregular imports, usually done by less than expert importers.

I know for a -fact- that quite a few people create hybrids and sell them as pure corns... needless to say, they are not my friends, but it an ever existing problem.

Well, a teenager here suddenly posted these for sale.
He claims that the dame is from abroad, and was since the egg laying, sold... the sire is a classic Corn.

According to him, the dame looked just like these... and the ratio is roughly 50/50- AKA, the pattern seems to behave in a dominant manner.

I wanted to run these by you... and hear your thoughts. Tesseras or Hybrids?

 

[Kokopelli]

The non- "Tessera" babies look like your classic Amels, including belly checkers etc.

 

[Shiari]

Sire shouldn't have been a classic then.

 

[Kokopelli]

Sire shouldn't have been a classic then.

Yes, you're obviously right!
I meant Amel... I said classic more in the sense that it was your run of the mil corn, seems perfectly what you'd expect from one with no visual variation of pattern.

 

[Kokopelli]

Yes, you're obviously right!
I meant Amel... I said classic more in the sense that it was your run of the mil corn, seems perfectly what you'd expect from one with no visual variation of pattern.

And to clarify, from a reliable source we know. The sire, for sure, is a pure Corn.

 

[Kokopelli]

Found another bit.
Here's a "family photo" of the clutch.



It's small... the colors are a bit off, but you can see the normally patterned hatchlings.

 

[HerpsOfNM]

There looks like something else is at play with the "tesseras", almost like the odd patterning seen in the cinder tesseras. The lateral patterning is just so weird, yet there doesn't seem to be anything else different about the normal-patterned babies in the family photo.

 

[Chip]

They sure look different from any amel tess I've ever produced, but I can't see any hybrid in there, unless maybe it's emoryi. Which is supposedly in everything anyway.

 

[Nanci]

Oren, when you say the sire was "classic," do you mean a normal wild-type coloration, or an amel, regular pattern?

 

[Nanci]

I think the "reduced" or "finer" side pattern is within the range of usual.

This is a Tessera which I have no reason to suspect as hybrid.

 

[Kokopelli]

Oren, when you say the sire was "classic," do you mean a normal wild-type coloration, or an amel, regular pattern?

As I later clarified- Amel, regular pattern, from known reliable pure origin.

 

[Nanci]

I wish you had one of the known-hybrid Tessera look-alikes to do comparison photos of scalation.

 

[Nanci]

And it would also be interesting to know if the known-hybrid clutches had contained any patterns other than Tessera-ish. Saddles, for example.

 

[Kokopelli]

Actually, I do have a few- I do not know the exact details(whether or not the offspring were either Tessera looking, intermediate, or "normal pattern, and at what percentage).
These were taken by a friend, who brought these from another source... there's no direct link between that and the source from which I brought my own animals.

I do not know where these animals are today:







The face, I think, is a give-away.

 

[Nanci]

Well, I would say those have no trace of side pattern at all. They look thicker, in general, through the neck. The head seems stockier and blunter, with a somewhat shorter nose.

 

[RobbiesCornField]

To me, they look like non-hybrid amel tesseras. The tessera pattern is very variable (just like every pattern morph), and to me, this looks to be within the range of the norm. Some people might consider them a "low quality" tessera, because the stripes are fairly thin with no apparent border, but I think these are going to color up awesomely as they get older. If I saw these on a table, I wouldn't hesitate in purchasing them if I were in the market for them.

 

[Kokopelli]

Thank you all for your input!
I contacted Don and he confirmed that he too doesn't see anything that should suggest hybrid origins in these babies.

Having said that, I plan on keeping these guys and let them grow... later on, I'll take more photos and share them... perhaps with size and age, something about the features will mature and indicate a hybrid origin.

We conducted a Ventral scale count and it seems to fit... but, there's an overlap in range and number of scales for several species so... it's not as strong an indicator as I would have liked.

 

[Kokopelli]

Thank you all for your input!
I contacted Don and he confirmed that he too doesn't see anything that should suggest hybrid origins in these babies.

Having said that, I plan on keeping these guys and let them grow... later on, I'll take more photos and share them... perhaps with size and age, something about the features will mature and indicate a hybrid origin.

We conducted a Ventral scale count and it seems to fit... but, there's an overlap in range and number of scales for several species so... it's not as strong an indicator as I would have liked.

I just wanted to add, what I meant was that we're trying to ensure that there's no hybrid blood in these babies beyond what MAY or MAY NOT be in all Tessera Corns.

I don't presume to make a call there... I do want to note though that some pattern morphs do indeed spring up in several, if not all species in one form of another(Stripe, Motley) and I wouldn't be surprised if Tessera too is such a morph. The fact that more than one species exhibits a morph doesn't mean it's the product of hybrid breeding... just common ancestry. It doesn't negate the possibility though either.

 

[Kokopelli]

I just wanted to share.
New babies emerged yesterday- some look like Tesseras, some do not... but neither the dame nor the sire had the pattern(half siblings to the ones posted above).
Sadly, despite my hopes, these are without a shred of doubt, hybrids.

The similarity to a true Corn is quite insane...identical really, probably due to re-introductions into the Corn genepool... but I can't avoid the obvious truth.

A local breeder here keeps mixing Goper snakes(striped) with other colubrids... he produced very similar babies but there was a slight difference from these(you can see the pictures on the white background)... now I know that the difference was mainly due to the higher percentage of Corn heritage in the mix for this particular clutch.

Does this mean that all Tesseras are indeed hybrids? I have no idea.

I do know that it is simply impossible, as this thread attests, to differentiate one Corn from the next even if one of them is a hybrid, if there's enough % Corn heritage.
I also know that the Tessera look was kind of unpredictably reproduced without having access to the Tessera gene from abroad.

This is dangerous,

Perhaps, in the end, we need to recognize that morphs and purity can't really go hand in hand... one should concern itself with preserving the classic look that is prevalent in the wild, and the other concerns itself with putting in as many alterations and deviations from that.

 

[Nanci]

Thanks for the update. I wish we could examine the look-alikes well enough to discern some obscure characteristic which unequivocally identified them as hybrids.