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Breeding question

Hi guys, advice needed.

I have a six month old male Snow who is growing nicely and I love him to bits. I'm considering moving him to a larger RUB very soon, and I've been considering getting a female corn to put in his place when I do, with a view to breeding from them at some point down the line.

As I'm fairly new to breeding and more than slightly confused, I'd like to ask you:

What kind of female should I buy?

What variations of corn snake are likely to be produced from this?

Are there any I should avoid? Why?


Thanks guys
 
Do you know if it has any hets?
All the information I'm going to give you will assume that your snake has no hets. If it happens to have any hets results could be different.

A rule of thumb that works for *most* morphs is that for a certain morph to visibly show in an offspring (i.e. homozygous recessive for a morph), then BOTH parents need to have at least one recessive allele of that particular trait. (So mother and father need to be either homozygous recessive, that is visibly showing the trait, or heterozygous for the trait you want).

If I use the letter A to represent an amel allele then:
AA = homozygous dominant = normal/wildtype = no recessive allele
Aa = heterozygous = normal = 1 recessive allele
aa = homozygous recessive = amel = 2 recessive alleles (most morphs need 2 recessive alleles to be expressed).

For every trait, an offspring will take 1 allele from the mother and 1 from the father. And since you generally need 2 recessive alleles for a morph to be visibly expressed, that means both the mother and father need to have at least 1 recessive allele (i.e. they either need to be heterozygous (het) or homozygous recessive).

Your snow is homozygous recessive for anery and homozygous recessive for amel. I do not know if it has any hets, so for now I'm just going to assume that it does not have any hets. This means that in the first generation of offspring, the only possible visibly expressed traits you will be able to get in the offspring are anery, amel, and anery-amel (snow).

Take into note that this doesn't count the few traits that do not work completely recessively. Like tessera. Also, the ultra gene is on the same locus as amel and so works slightly differently, so you could get a slightly different result if you breed your snow to ultra/ultramel...which if you are looking for something different in the first generation is probably your best bet.

snow x ultramel het anery = amels, ultramels, snows, ultramelaners (ultramel anery)
snow x ultramelaner = snows, ultramelaner
snow x ultra het anery = ultramel and ultramelaner
etc...

If you don't want to use ultra/ultramel

snow x snow = snow
snow x anery = anery
snow x amel = amel
snow x anery het amel = anery, snow
snow x amel het anery = amel, snow
snow x normal het amel anery = normal, anery, amel, snow
snow x (caramel or lavender or lava or stripe or etc....) = all normals (unless your snow happens to be het for any of those)

Now, if you want to do a project, you could breed your snow to whatever morph(s) you would like to include in your project. Then you breed the first generation back to eachother and in the 2nd generation you will get your morphs to appear.

Lets say you want to include stripe into your snows...
snow x snow stripe = f1 generation = 100% snow het stripe
snow het stripe x snow het stripe = f2 generation = snows, snow stripe

If you want to add lavender
snow x lavender = f1 generation = 100% normals het lavender, amel, anery
normal het lavender, amel, anery x same = f2 generation = normals, amels, lavenders, anery, opal, anery lavender, snow, lavender snow.

You could add more than one morph, whatever you want, to attempt to create whatever you want.

I don't know if I'd add hypo to the mix, because hypo can be hard to distinguish when it is visible in conjunction with amel, but that's just what I'd do. Though you could, if you wanted to, like in the lavender example just above you could breed it to a hypo lavender instead, and in the f2 generation you will also get some ghosts and hypo lav and ghost lav, but then when it is with the amel morphs it might be hard to distinguish.

I'd play around with a corn calculator www.corncalc.com
 
Thanks for the amazing reply.

I've alot of reading to do but mostly it's making sense to me. I can see why so many people get involved in the hobby.

So for example if I wanted to, at some point, produce a coral snow, then I'd need to breed with a.... Hypo Amel first? What is that likely to produce first generation? And then what?

The calculator doesn't seem to have snow in it :S


I'm sorry if this is really simple to answer, I'm just slightly confused :)

Cheers
 
Snow is Amelanistic + Anerythrystic - you have to enter both of them separately in calculators to show Snow.
 
Thanks for the amazing reply.

I've alot of reading to do but mostly it's making sense to me. I can see why so many people get involved in the hobby.

So for example if I wanted to, at some point, produce a coral snow, then I'd need to breed with a.... Hypo Amel first? What is that likely to produce first generation? And then what?

If you are wanting a genetic "coral" aka hypo snow you could do a few things:
snow x hypo
snow x hypo amel
snow x hypo anery
snow x hypo anything

As long as you breed your snow to something with hypo in it, then it will be possible to get some hypo snow in the f2 generation. Though amel tends to mask hypo, so you may or may not be able to see the difference between the snow and the hypo snow.

However, a lot of the really pink snows that pop up and use the coral/champaigne/etc... names are selectively bred for their pink color, some don't even have hypo in them.


The calculator doesn't seem to have snow in it :S

a snow is just a trade name for an animal that is amel and anery. So in the cornsnake calculator under the amel/ultra locus you would mark (aa amel), and under the anery locus you would mark (nn anery).

Simliarly if you used a ghost, a ghost is a trade name for hypo and anery, so you'd have to mark hypo and anery.
 
Thanks for the help guys.

One more question - What is the best way to find out if my snow is hiding any hets? By breeding with a normal het anery, amel, motley etc?

Here is a pic of my snow, he's fantastic (well, to me anyway!)

4929397836
 
Anery and Amel in a prospective breeding partner won't help you, as your snake is already a combo of Anery and Amel - you know it's homozygous for those, so they won't be "hidden hets".

However, if you bred yours with a Normal het Amel, Anery and Motley, you should get a neat mixed clutch of Normals, Snows, Amels and Anerys, with the test being whether yours is carrying Motley.

Test breeding for hidden hets is always a lottery. You could breed for years with a different partner each year, only to conclude that there are no hidden hets at all. I'm not sure what the most likely hets would be for a Snow to carry - perhaps someone else can advise.

If you can get in contact with the breeder, they might be able to tell you what morphs/hets the parents were. That way you could know for sure what your Corn is actually carrying. It's probably the quickest, safest, cheapest and least potentially disappointing route to go.
 
I started out with an Amel no known hets. Had a mix up with vivs and he bred a motley het stripe, acceidentally tested the Amel for motley and stripe and the normal mot for amel. Proved neither carried what the other had. Next year I plan to test my Amel with my Ghost. Will see if he has anery or hypo and if she has amel. Mind if a test shows there are no hets you will get all normals het for what the parents are. Can you place normals in your area or keep all of them yourself? Be sure you know if you can before breeding.

Otherwise you have gotten good info :)
 
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