The days of the $1000 corn are numbered. Unless you are the top of the top and the first of the first....good luck. But, let me prattle on....
In older days...say 10 years or so....$1000 snakes were very rare in the cornsnake hobby. In fact, they were even rare in most markets. I think part of the problem is a larger problem than cornsnakes. I think once the ball python market started charging unbelievable prices for stuff, every other market tried to do the same thing. It wasn't long until you started seeing "investment" animals for sale everywhere in every species. People started viewing snakes as an investment that was going to pay off down the road and the frenzy resulted in higher prices.
Was a spider ball python really worth thousands a couple years ago? Maybe, maybe not. When the ultramel craze broke 3 years or so ago were they really worth as much as people were asking? Co-Dom morphs are going to drop and they are going to drop quickly. Everyone can produce them very fast and it doesn't take the work like the recessive stuff does. So...it only stands to reason then that prices should fall pretty fast. Look at spider ball pythons now. Look at ultramels and golddusts now....not near what they were 2-3 years ago. Look at simple recessive stuff now....pieds in the ball pythons and something like a lavender blood or ice corn. They have some value but not the steep decline like co-dom. Supply and demand. Plus, don't forget the limited potential in ultramels. Only good with an amel based morph. Breed to an anery and you get zip. Okay, sure you could get an ultra anery down the road, but right now...what do you have? (By the way, for what it is worth, for my two cents I think those working on ULTRA morphs withOUT amel will find an investment far better and lasting longer than ultraMEL stuff)
Look at it another way...
Try creating that project starting from scratch. Lets say ultramel lavender versus lavender blood. For the first you need an opal and ultramel. For the second, lavender and blood. Neither one in their own right is very expensive. Next step, you breed them together. Case 1 gives you ultramels het for lavender and amels, the other gives you normals double het lavender blood. Now, without buying any new snakes, with the ultramels you can breed them together or breed an offspring back to the opal parent. Breeding siblings together will give you ultramel lavenders and ultra lavenders and other stuff but in addition to breeding siblings you can breed to the opal parent and that will give you 1 in 4 of the clutch being ultramel lavenders. With the other project you are stuck breeding them together as breeding to the parents won't help AND you have a 1 in 16 shot at making that lavender blood. Now...to get that target the easiest, which one will you do? Also, for the person who cannot holdback a large amount....hmmm....several double hets versus one male to breed to a parent opal or one pair that'll return better odds than the 1 in 16....
I know an explanation of the workings of a co-dom morph probably isn't necessary, but I wanted to include it. I think we'll see ultramels level out fairly quickly and the high dollar prices will come down to where they realistically should be. The first people in the ultramel game will (or have) made some money and I think the rest of the people will enter when it is low and it'll stay that way. To the breeders, ultramel things are neat. To most of the public, they look very similar to an amel, hypo, ghost, etc.
Anyone who has followed the ball python market knows the codom stuff is dropping...and dropping fast. Codom corns will do the same thing. Anyone who has followed the snake market will see that snakes were low one time then had this burst of being hard to get and high dollar and now I think we'll see a leveling out. Sure, there will still be rare snakes and some people might pay a good penny for them...in fact I hope so as I'd like to be able to sell some of my rarer stuff one day. In the grand scheme, however, there are a LOT of people working with a LOT of different combos, all trying to sell them. In a market like this where people can actually create most of the morphs out there
ON THEIR OWN if they put some time in, there is no HUGE incentive to buy that morph first unless they really like it or they plan to breed it to produce more. If it is the first, the market stays high as that snake is essentially out of the market. If the second, however, the market heads down as more snakes--but more importantly--as
more breeders enter and that will cause lower prices as each breeder attempts to sell their stock by undercutting the other guy. And that, my friends, is where I see things going....
.....so I suggest half of you bail now...especially those working on lava, sunkissed, or other morphs I'm working on.
