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Specters and outcrosses

Kevin S.

Active member
After taking a break from snakes for about a year and a half, I got the urge to pick up a few more and quickly got tempted back into a corn project. I'm picking up where I left off-with specters and specter outcrosses. I'm glad to see some people are still working with these, but it seems no one has any F2s from crossing them with other morphs yet. Hopefully I'll have some specter motleys when I breed mine and I'm mulling over some other potential pairings that may be interesting.

Anyway, here are the new additions to get me back in the corn game. First up is a specter male. For those that don't know, specters are a line of unusual ghost corns that trace back to an unusual wild caught individual Kathy Love acquired in Naples, FL. They tend to have pink background coloration, though some don't (the non-pink individuals are sometimes referred to as banshees), and sometimes have yellow coloration in their dorsal saddles, but not always. Pattern aberrancies are also common in this line as well as thick black saddle borders. So there are a few interesting traits prevalent in this lineage, but they can be expressed independently of one another and their mode of inheritance is still uncertain.


This female is the result of breeding a specter to a ghost motley. She has just a touch of the yellow saddle coloration, but not nearly as obvious as some.


This boy is the offspring of a specter and a strawberry motley het for anery. Interestingly, he shows a fair amount of pink background coloration already and should be a colorful adult. Apparently the pink coloration can be expressed in some first generation outcrosses, but not all. I'll be interested to see what results from pairing him with other specter outcrosses.



Finally, here are two female siblings to the male above. At least one of them appears to be showing some pink coloration already, but it's very difficult to represent it accurately in photographs. I'm curious to see how they will develop as they mature.


These are all quick pictures taken just after I got them. I'll try to get some better shots soon and hopefully I'll have a few new additions to add in the near future as well.
 
Nice snakes and good for you to get back into the hobby! I agree people don't work enough with specters. I remember first hearing about "Naples Ghosts" a long time ago and I always wonder if I had acquired some back then what I could have bred them to by now... Nice to see someone making them a specialty.
 
Curious, did the younger group come from Jorge? If not, i'd love to know who from. I bought a pair from a similar pairing, if not the same, though I went for a hypo/strawberry female. Planning on crossing the male ghost back to the sister & to a salmon ghost from Walter Smith.

If there's someone else out there doing the same cross, I wouldn't mind picking up more.
 
Glad your back, Kevin. Hopefully you, Jorge, or others I had sold specters to can help me figure them out!

In retrospect, I guess it would have been wiser (and easier) to have bred specters to normals instead of every other morph I could get my hands on. But I have to admit the F1's from specter x sunkissed really surprised me.
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A few of the specter crosses I've done:

Specter x strawberry motley het anery
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One of my Specter x Silverqueens (what I call my "kaiser corns")
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F2's from classic (specter x fluorescent) x banshee (specter type b)
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I've also got a few others around, like specter x hypo blood, specter x kastanie, specter x salmon snow, but most of the offspring I've been holding back, (including ALL of the specter x sunkissed) I lost last fall when my heating system malfunctioned in my snake room, cooking 2/3 of my collection.


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Curious, did the younger group come from Jorge?

Yes, that trio is from Jorge. The male is looking much more colorful than I would have expected, but is unlike a specter in appearance (pinkish background color as well as lightening dorsal blotches that I think will be orange). He looks waaay more colorful now than the last strawberry anery I kept did at twice this size. It's not a very good picture, but here's one I took of him last night.

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Wow, sunkissed by specter looks awesome
I picked up this sunkissed anery motley, so I'll be making anery (and possibly motley) variations of this combo as soon as he's ready to breed.

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I've also got a few others around, like specter x hypo blood, specter x kastanie, specter x salmon snow, but most of the offspring I've been holding back, (including ALL of the specter x sunkissed) I lost last fall when my heating system malfunctioned in my snake room, cooking 2/3 of my collection.

Donovan, they're not nearly as colorful as the others, but so far my favorite specter project is these "aneries" from Adiel. He bred a pink specter male that I used to own to a female ghost. This male had previously only produced ghost offspring with other ghosts, so it seemed like a sure thing that he was a hypo anery in addition to whatever else makes specters look the way they do. However, this female produced two phenotypes in her clutch.

These darker "aneries" look very unique to me though. They have dark brown blotches with thick black borders rather than the solid black of most aneries. They definitely look different from the much lighter ghosts in the clutch, but I just can't figure out how these would possibly NOT be hypo aneries considering the parents. Since the male is proven several times over and has never fathered any non-hypo aneries before, it seems like the female's genetics should explain this discrepancy (if she's an anery het hypo for example). Seeing pictures of her, she sure looks like a ghost to me though. Anyway, here are some pictures of an "anery" offspring from that pairing.
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Its is great that your back in the game Kevin, it is refreshing to see someone else who has an affinity for specters.
 
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