I think that anybody who has 30 Corns and plans on breeding them, will keep some kind of records about their colony and offspring if they are going to be a responsible breeder. I have always kept records of all of my snakes, such as who the breeder was that produced them, their year of birth, sex, and eventually their offspring. I made up my system as I went along. The records where there, but they were not really of any use, because you could not really compare or trace much of anything.
I think there is some value in knowing who the parents of your Corns actually are, instead of only getting information on the morphs that produced them. Sometimes you can get some pretty good info on the female who produced the clutch and what morph the many potential fathers were, but what about info on the generation before that? An ACR registered Corn will have all of the info most people could possibly want, especially as each years breeding season is added year after year. Check out some of the Lava based morphs that are registered with the ACR. In time, as more information is added, the records that go back to the beginning of a morphs discovery will have more value than all of the registration fees combined.
When I first heard about the ACR, I thought that if I could get all of my Corns registered, then perhaps I could make some use out of all of this data that I had been collecting for many years. I had enough paper in boxes, in every conceivable nook and cranny imaginable, that I was able to go back to the beginning, and start registering my founding stock. As I continued registering each of my previous breeding season, I soon began to realize the value the ACR was going to have for me, and to anybody who decides to participate.
What good were the records that I was keeping really. It would have taken me days to really trace any new gene that I happen to discover, and they were of no real use to anybody else. Why do breeders keep records anyway. Is it for their own use, and nothing more. The only real disadvantage of the ACR that I could come up with is not being able to hide things, but I really did not want to be a secret basement breeder anyway. Since you do not have to register you Corns until they are breeding, there is a least a two year lag, and any super secrete projects that you happen to be working on, that nobody else could have possibly conceived of, will have a good two or three year head start.
Now that I have converted to the ACR system, I can tell you that my record keeping has improved dramatically, and it is actually much easier to keep track of everything than the way I was doing it before. It is pretty simple to write the males ACR # on the females cage when he breeds her, and when the female lays her eggs, it is extremely easy to record the parents of the clutch, 2008 X 2005, or what ever it happens to be. I still have to keep separate listings of the clutches, but now that I have the system in place, it will grow before my eyes, year after year.
Many people talk about the extra work or cost that the ACR causes. I have always recorded who the parents of each hatchling were anyway by a clutch number on the lid. Now, they get a sticker. What is the cost of not preserving the records of your Corns? What is the value of your records being preserved when you are gone, or decided that you no longer want to raise Corns? You may not care, but a lot of people do. The contribution you make to the Corn World, will forever be preserved, or you will be forgotten in time. Your name might get in a book, but it would be nice to know that you produced a particular Corn Snake in 2006, 10 years from now. Every year, I find out by chance that many of my Corns are carrying recessive genes. It would sure be nice to know what genes my Corns may be carrying, so I could plan my breedings better. If a Corn you buy is pre-registered with the ACR, you will have all of the info that is possible about any possible het genes it may be carrying. This is of great value to everybody in my opinion. Some people won’t even tell you a Corn is possibly het for this or that gene, unless you pay for the info. If a Corn is het for a gene it is worth more money, and sometimes if they are possibly het for a particular gene they may be as well, but why not pass on the info that a Corn is 50% possibly het for Amel or Anery and all other known genes. Actually, you won’t have to pass on anything except the parents ACR #’s. A buyer can look back in their ancestry and see that one of the Corns in their Corns family tree was het for Blood. This gene could have easily been passed on as het 50% of the time for many generations.
Corn Snake genetics is exploding. We are discovering new genes at a rate that none of us could have imagined a few years ago. We are going to start figuring out much more about our Corns than just the major genes they are carrying. In time, we are going to learn why Corals are pink, and how we can predict how to produce more of them. Are there several separate genes or lineages of Corns that produce pink Corns, but are not compatible when bred together. I think we already know this is the case, but without a system, like the ACR, to permanently keep track of the lineage of Corns, we would be trudging ahead rather blindly, and the information a breeder has taken a lifetime to discover, can be lost forever in an instant. I personally think the ACR and this forum is the best thing that ever happened to Corn Snakes.
