Thinking about breeding.

After looking at Morph Market and seeing all the pretty Corns there I am thinking about picking up a girl, telling the wife we may breed them in the future is a good excuse. I read most of the sticky’s in this Forum so I have no delusions of making thousands easily, I do have a few questions though. 1. Any big advice that was not in the sticky’s? 2. Is Morph Market normally a decent place to find little ones? 3. After playing with the calculator late into the night I was thinking some form of bright Tessera would be a good pare for my boy, but I only have a vague understanding of genetics so I’m all ears for recommendations! I attached a picture of my Honey Tessera “boy” next step is to sex him.

All the breeding stickies on this site are great. As for genetics, if you have just a basic understanding of how recessive genes work, your should be mostly set because most corn snake genes are recessive (meaning you need two copies of a gene for it to be visually expressed). Tessera is actually one of the dominant genes, so if you would like to produce more tesseras, you don't need to get another one because your current snake can pass that on. Otherwise, he is a honey, which is caramel and sunkissed, both recessive genes, so if you want to get more honeys, you'll need a snake that is at least het for both of those genes. Does he have any hets that you know of? You can also look through iansvivarium.com to see some other morphs and see what genes are in each combo. That site has a good calculator as well, so you can play around with that.

ok so I was wondering how dependent a snakes parents are on the expression of there genes. IE my boy has a broken dorsal stripe can he produce Tessara offspring with full dorsal stripes? Would that be more likely if he was paired with a different Tessara? second question is if you pare up snakes with different recessive traits will they produce a wide verity of offspring or will the "most dominant" of the recessive traits be the only ones expressed?

I think if you paired him to a tessera with a more clean stripe, you'd probably get a mixture of both. I'm not sure if any breeding trials have done to prove whether a messy stripe or clean stripe is more likely to be passed on. In your snake's case, because he is sunkissed, that's what is causing his messy stripe, although there are varying levels of expression among sunkissed tesseras.

As far as recessive traits, none of them are more dominant than others (other than motley/stripe, which share a locus and motley is dominant over stripe). So if a snake is homozygous for amel and for anery, they both get equally expressed and create a snow. Is that kind of what you're asking?

hypnoctopus said:

As far as recessive traits, none of them are more dominant than others (other than motley/stripe, which share a locus and motley is dominant over stripe). So if a snake is homozygous for amel and for anery, they both get equally expressed and create a snow. Is that kind of what you're asking?

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Yes! Thanks I have been looking at the calculator on morph market and it looked like I would just have a lot of Het baby’s, could not figure out what that would look like.

That’s good to know about the first part as well! I guess I’ll just have to eather make the plung or not! Lol

With your breeding plans, expect to have successes and failures. Some years you will think you are breaking even. Other years, not so much.

But treat it as a hobby and not a business venture. That makes the failures not quite so painful if you are counting your chickens before they hatch and have a budget worked around your hopes.

Oh, and bone up a LOT on how to get problem feeder babies started. You probably will need that info foremost in your brain during hatching season.

And if your experience will be much like mine was over the years, the absolutely most spectacular baby you produce will be the biggest pain in the butt to get feeding. I believe it is some sort of natural law. Connie and I used to have a running joke each year about this phenomenon. I would show her some really gorgeous unique little animal that just hatched out, and she would just say, "So what? It won't eat and will die on you!" Gallows humor, but it kept us a little bit sane being able to laugh at ourselves, I think.

Thanks Ritch, I totaly am thinking I want to do this more to see what fun little patterns I can get out of the eggs then anything else. But its good to know that just like everything else in life Murphy strikes hard. Its one reason I am struggling to pick a girl, I may not even mate them so part of me wants to pic purely based off the induvial lady (candy cane Tessara, and inferno motly) but then I run the calculator and the babies don't sound as exciting as If I grabbed a Sunkissed Het Carmal I am looking at. LOL the wife probably wont let me get but one more right now so I am thinking ill just have to learn some more.

Yes, that's been my experience too! The coolest baby is the one who won't eat, or best case scenario, it does eat but has a rotten personality!

https://www.morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/colubrids/corn-snakes/genetic-calculator/?s1=Amelanistic%2CTessera%2CMotley%2CHet+Hypo%2CHet+Anerythristic&s2=Honey%2CTessera

so this chart means that there could be anything from Honey Tessara to Inferno motely babies from this paring?

You didn't do it quite right. This is what it should look like:

https://www.morphmarket.com/c/repti...era,Sunkissed&s2=Amelanistic,Sunkissed,Motley

You'd get sunkissed tessera and sunkissed babies, all het for amel, caramel, and motley.

What did I do wrong?

First image shows what I entered. You said honey tessera to inferno motley. So genetically that will be sunkissed caramel tessera to sunkissed amel motley. Second image shows what you entered, which is amel tessera motley het hypo and het anery to your honey tessera.

Got it! Sorry I forgot to mention the Hets in my original post!

Oh okay. Well in this case the hets (het hypo and het anery, correct?) won't matter for the hatchlings. Each baby would be 50% possibly het for those two hets, but since the hets don't match any of the genes of your honey tessera (unless he has hidden hets), the babies won't visually show those genes.