Anery or Charcoal?

Hi everyone,

So I bought a snake from someone a couple of months ago and recently asked about it's genetics from the person i bought the snake from - they directed me to their Instagram with the below picture (screenshot from there) of the snakes it was bred from.

My question, is the anery an anery, or a charcoal? It's rather hard to tell and they don't seem to know a whole bunch regarding morphs.

I've not long got into owning corn snakes so trying make sure I understand everything surrounding genetics and husbandry (seem to have nailed the latter - snake in question is eating very well, has had 2 full sheds, growing really well and has good levels of activity). Eventually, years down the line if/when I get into breeding I would want to understand the genetic history any snakes I may own or should I sell the snake, I wouldn't want to mislead anyone over its genetics.

Thanks in advance,
Jonathan.

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Baby pictures of the snake in question would make the id a lot easier, but the low contrast, one color head, and lack of any significant yellow makes me lean strongly towards charcoal.

Shiari said:

Baby pictures of the snake in question would make the id a lot easier, but the low contrast, one color head, and lack of any significant yellow makes me lean strongly towards charcoal.

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That's my thinking- unfortunately they're not great on giving any information and the only pictures of the clutch I can get is attached. Even still, you can't really see the babies particularly well. My thinking is if it was an anery, they'd have produced some snows but all they produced was amels and ?anery/charcoal. The one I bought was an Amel.

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Those look like normals and amels. Too bad there's no baby pictures of the parent.

So, those results could mean 1 of 2 things: one- the amel is not het for anery and the sire is an anery. two- the amel is het OR not het for anery and the sire is a charcoal.

Shiari said:

Those look like normals and amels. Too bad there's no baby pictures of the parent.

So, those results could mean 1 of 2 things: one- the amel is not het for anery and the sire is an anery. two- the amel is het OR not het for anery and the sire is a charcoal.

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The clutch in that photo is the offspring of the snakes in the first picture.

I suppose if I do ever start breeding, I could proof it with a snow, as if the parents were Anery het amel x amel unknown het, the amel off spring would amel het anery, which should if I've got it right, when bred with a snow, should produce snows and amel het anery. Or have I got that completely wrong?

Honestly, this corn snake morphs thing is utterly confusing and to add, a lot of the morphs appear pretty much the same to me! Yet some some of the supposedly same morph look completely different!

Sometimes I think people just make it up as they go [emoji23][emoji23]

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Yes, you have the genetics correct. If the parent of your snake is an anery, and you breed your amel to a snow, you should then produce snows and and amels het anery.

A closer look at the eye can give you the answer.
True charcoals have nearly solid black eyes while anery has an grey iris.

Cheers,
Seriva

Seriva Senkalora said:

A closer look at the eye can give you the answer.
True charcoals have nearly solid black eyes while anery has an grey iris.

Cheers,
Seriva

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When I get home I can show you pictures of charcoals I have hatched here with bright silver eyes. This is not an accurate way to tell. IF the iris is black, most likely a charcoal yes. But if the iris is light colored it tells you nothing.

Well, I'm breeding and keeping corns for a while now and with european lineage this works 100%. I wouldn't say this if it hadn't been proven over many years.

But I know about Anerys without yellow which had been called Charcoal when they are in fact just Anery. Those had light eyes like your snake but when bred to a dark eyed true Charcoal, it resulted in a clutch of normals. ����

Seriva Senkalora said:

Well, I'm breeding and keeping corns for a while now and with european lineage this works 100%. I wouldn't say this if it hadn't been proven over many years.

But I know about Anerys without yellow which had been called Charcoal when they are in fact just Anery. Those had light eyes like your snake but when bred to a dark eyed true Charcoal, it resulted in a clutch of normals. ����

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Well, guess you'd better hope that none of my line makes it to Europe! The grandmother of that charcoal was a near black pewter from SMR. The grandfather was a silver eyed charcoal from a random post store. The grandfather was bred to the pewter and a ghost. The pewter pairing produced all charcoals. The ghost pairing produced normals, hypos, and amels. He was most certainly a charcoal. I kept a daughter with bronze eyes (you can look at my dark charcoal thread to see her) and she was bred to a pewter with black eyes. And one of the results was that silver eyed charcoal I posted.
My charcoals also develop yellow.

Shiari said:

Well, guess you'd better hope that none of my line makes it to Europe!

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that would give a lot of fight, tears and more fights who are right now or not under the german breeder 'clan' and it would call into question all previous 'knowledge'


personally I think, theres no need to discuss when the cornsnake is proven, it is.. :shrugs:
lineage are different, bloodpools are different, and who knows what else is different on the other side of the sea
I think, american lines give you way more options ....

Good luck figuring it out. Anerys and Charcoals have been bred together for decades now, and honestly, it got to a point where I just stopped trying to figure out the differences. I could find exceptions to every rule that I and others would come up with over the years. I would have thought I would have produced MANY individuals homozygous for both genes together, but darn if I could pick them out of the lineup. So when I sold babies from such breedings, best I could do was to guess at what each of those dark drab colorless babies actually were. Towards the end, I would just bulk them all out with the normals anyway, and who knows what the buyers labelled them as. :shrugs:

And, of course, I threw Hypo (any and all varieties) into the mix too, so that just wound up producing nightmares about being able to accurately identify the babies when they hatched out. For some reason, people just didn't appreciate my telling them what the heritage of the snakes they were getting were, but pointedly telling them that an ACCURATE ID was pretty much impossible. Hence towards the end of SerpenCo, I was making up a lot of ID labels with just question marks on them.

It wasn't just because of the physical workload that I decided to retire. The mental load was even more burdensome by a long shot. I really couldn't sustain a business depending on retail sales when it had arrived at a point that I had to admit I didn't know what the hell I was producing any longer. How the heck can you sell accurately genetically identified babies when TRULY you need to grow them up and breed them to 100% KNOWN genetic types and observe the babies (understanding that Murphy's Law reigns supreme in this stuff) before you can truly (maybe) KNOW what they are and put a label on them?

And I seriously doubt things are any better today for most folks unless VERY strenuous efforts have been made to identify and isolate each and every gene in every animal they are working with. Just the various flavors of "hypomelanism" in any breeding plans will put you in a straight jacket pretty quickly. Mine is still hanging in the closet. :laugh: Heck, I STILL have nightmares about this stuff!

IMHO.

So like I said, GOOD LUCK! Don't take this all too seriously or there will be a straight jacket with your name on it somewhere.