Inbreeding

Is inbreeding an issue with corns?
I mean- when I request snakes from a breeder, should I request two unrelated corns? even if I want to of the same cultivar?
Does it have an effect on the lil ones?
Also, are any of the methods of sexing harmful? I mean, Do I need to worry about how my breeder sexed these snakes? How common are sexing errors? THanks!

Hi CK,
Inbreeding is never good in my opinion.
But before I get ATTACKED. I know that some inbreeding is neccessary to sometimes improve on a line or get a certain colour phase. But it should be parent/offspring not siblings.
Not knowing how much inbreeding two snakes have gone through can be harmfull to future babies.
I bought a ghost corn a few years ago. A beautiful little baby, a great eater. About one month later I noticed a lump just above the vent area. I thought that maybe she was hurt when the sexing was takeing place.
The Vet said not to worry about it.
To cut a long story short My snake ( Soba ) now has lumps the entire lenght of her body from head to tip of the tail. A few breeders and the Vet said it is from too much inbreeding. A few breeders said that I should put her down. I will never do that, I will just NEVER breed her.
In every way she is normal. And she seems happy.
Take care,
Jimmy

As long as it is not multiple generations of brother/sister inbreeeding, the practice of sibling breeding is fine. The corn snake population is so diverse in its genetic makeup (which is why new color morphs are still showing up out there), that a single generation or even two of breeding siblings to bring a trait out is harmless, in my opinion.

Breeding a snake back to it's parent is also fine, but that only brings out (in the F2) the genes found in that half of the genetic makeup of the F1. To fully express what you hope are simple recessive genes in the F1 generation, you need to breed siblings together to achieve the desired effect in the F2. Quite frankly, that is exactly how many (if not most) of the snow corns are produced by breeders who produce their own rather than breeding purchased snows or purchased hets.

I understand what the previous poster was saying about inbreeding being dangerous, and I concur with those ideas in regard to multiple-generational inbreeding. However, I see nothing wrong with breeding siblings together in order to bring out the recessive genes they may have hidden within.

Read Rich's explanation about how he uncovered the Lavander and Caramel genes, and you'll see that this is exactly how he did so. Therefore, all of the snakes available in those color morphs are the result of some sibling to sibling, and offspring to parent inbreedings. They seem to be doing fine.

In answer to your sexing question. Yes it can harm the snake if done improperly. And yes snakes do get sexed wrong, how often this happens I have no idea. I bought a pair one time that was mis-sexed by one of the biggest dealers in the country. I'd say buy from someone you trust that guarantees the snake will be properly sexed. Even the best make mistakes and the best do all they can to correct them. Also you should learn how to sex snakes yourself. You might be able to find someone in a local herp club, or a local breeder that will teach you. IMHO

One thing I would like to caution people against is the using the 'inbreeding' boogie man as the cause of all problems. It seems that ANY problem that shows up, many people are quick to pin it on inbreeding as being the cause.

Let's look at an example.

How many of you give your snakes vitamin supplements? Probably not many, I'll bet. And the reason for this is because many people will claim that they feed their snakes whole
mice, which is a natural feed item, so it should be all the snakes need in their diet. Hogwash, in my opinion. There is a WORLD of difference between a wild mouse and a mouse raised up in a cage. Wild mice nibble on everything that they can get their teeth on. And when they finally make that fatal mistake of wondering what that snake's flicking tongue is, everything in their gut is provided as nutrient to the snake that ate it. On the other hand, a mouse raised up for feed in a colony is fed rodent chow, dog chow, or something similar, and that's it. Suppose there is some vital nutrient (vitamin) not provided for in the feed given to these mice? Over time, this lack will be cumulative, even across generations. So eventually a person would hatch out a clutch of babies that would be weak, deformed, or exhibit some other problem, and sure enough, inbreeding would be labeled as the cause of the problem, when it was HUSBANDRY that caused the problem.

There can also just be genetic incompatibilities that show you that you shouldn't breed those animals together again. Human beings take all kinds of tests that can determine interesting things about the probabilities of the offspring, and in some cases are advised that it would not be a good idea. I DARE anyone here to stand outside a maternity ward of a local hospital, and when you see an unlucky couple with a deformed baby ask them if the cause was from inbreeding. Shtuff just happens sometimes and snake breeding is not immune to shtuff.

Oh yeah, one final comment: If inbreeding is entirely detrimental, and if the story of Adam and Eve is true, what does that say about the entire human race?

IMHO

Vitamin suppliments

OK Rich,

What vitamin suppliment do you recommend, how much and how often?

Hi Everyone,
The old topic of inbreeding. What I was trying to get at before is if you dont know the geneology of your snake, buying siblings and breeding them could be a problem.
Rich, Adam and Eve ? I am sure that you dont want to stir that hornets nest .
Jimmy

Susan - I've been using a mixture of Blair's Super Preen and Osteoform for years. Once the babies get an established feed response, they get the back end of the pinky mouse dipped into the powder every meal. Growing baby snakes need calcium to grow their skeletal structures and harden up the bones. Unless they are provided full sunlight a few hours each day, you need to give them D3 so they can assimilate dietary calcium intake.

With the adults, they get the vitamins as well, but usually I am more critical of the females getting it rather than the males. But I don't shortchange anyone. They get the supplements just about every meal, but not always.

Jimmy - heck I love kicking hornets' nests! As long as I have a fly swatter in my hand. It's a good workout for my reflexes.

A long while back I had some holly rollers corner me while I was out washing my car when I lived up in Maryland. They caught me in a particularly bad moment, attitude wise, and I had them running for cover in short order. Let's just say that when I die, I have a few complaints to lodge with the man upstairs.

As for the siblings question, yes that could be a problem, but there are a lot of factors involved. Personally I try to send out animals that are as unrelated as possible, but to be honest, when you are the one whom comes up with a new cultivar, it is not possible to have animals completely unrelated. Every Butter corn in existence, as far as I know, is a direct descendant of that one normal colored gene carrying animal I bought in a pet shop in Cape Coral, Florida many years ago. No way around it. Every Lavender corn in existence is also a direct descendant of that one animal I caught in Murdock, Florida.

I have actually had people tell me that they bought some animals from another breeder and then wanted to buy some unrelated stock from me, little realizing that it makes little difference at all. Matter of fact, in some instances, there is a real good chance that I sold the animals or their parents to their other source!

Heck, I remember one humorous incident where someone bought a tangerine Honduran milk from me at a show and then went to another table to buy an unrelated animal. That was back in the days when I put my logo on the bottoms of the deli cups. When he got home, he discovered that BOTH deli cups had my logos on them! Before shows open to the public, many times dealers will buy from other dealers and then just mark up the prices a bit. This is exactly what happened in this case, and it is not at all unusual.

Rich,

Is that a half and half mixture? And where is the best place to get them?

Thanks

Colleen

Heck, we usually pick up Osteoform at the shows we attend. Matter of fact, we just got a 5 gallon bucket filled with the stuff from our friends Doug and Mikki Barr up in Tennessee. So that should hold us for a while. I recently had someone send me a link to a source for Blair's Super Preen, so if I can dredge it up out of my old emails, I'll post the address here. A keyword search in Google.com might find it for you, though.

Too much inbreeding is bad yes you will get a ressed gene mostlikely but it might not be the one you want. Please remember that color and pattern with andlength genes are not the only genes in these guys. The same inbreeding that could remove all the blackk pigment from you lovely lil new baby can give its lil brother 3 eyes. No I do not think simease twins are a result of inbreeding. Laws of nature...Some times the eggs just dont seperate. But dont fool yourself into thinking that the worst thing to result from your inbreeding siblings is a normal. But that is just my 2cp

Well,

I'll just say this on the inbreeding issue and then leave it alone. How far do you think cornsnakes travel during their lifetime in the wild? I'm sure they move around quite a bit, but it's movement within a fairly small geographic locale. That being the case, I would think that a large amount of the "natural" breeding that takes place is between siblings (or cousins at the very least) that have not crawled too far from their original hatching location.

After all, isn't this why we have okeetees that look so different from anerys, miami phases, upper keys corns, and kisatchie corns? Populations get segregated and they are inbred to the point of producing distinctions within themselves. Look to the intermontana sub-group of the emoryi family for another example.

Nobody is saying that you should breed brothers to sisters for multiple generations. But to condemn all inbreeding as "bad" is just too short sighted of what happens in the wild, in my opinion.

Darin