Actually I may be part of the problem. I get lots of Hypomelanistics that are from my Silver Queen Ghost line that are VERY nice looking animals, and depending on the day of the week, I alternate between calling them Crimsons, or just plain Hypomelanistics. Some of these will have those reddish colored abdomens as seen in the above photos. LOTS of my Silver Queens are turning up with patternless abdomens as well, but of course, they are silver gray colored rather than red as in the Hypos.
Many of the Upper Keys corns will have patternless abdomens as well. This past season I bred a Hypo Blood Red into one of my Upper Keys females and got 6 or so eggs to hatch. All of the babies were Hypo Blood Reds. Figure that one out....
We have SO much to learn yet....
I think it is kind of humorous that while us poor peons in the corn snake arena are trying to figure out what exactly these oddities are and be technically correct about them, the people over in the ball python arena are slapping names on things with wild abandon (along with mind boggling price tags), and not taking the time to figure out what they really have. I had one guy quote the following in a message on FaunaClassifieds recently:
"I count 63 proven genetic mutations at this time that I know of personaly."
Sorry, but I just can't swallow that one. In order for someone to lay claim to genetic mutation number 63, they would have to breed this line against everything else prior to it that was a likely candidate in order to prove that it was not just a variation of an existing genetic line. There is just no way that could have happened.
I guess the difference is that we are trying to understand this and unravel the mystery, whereas that other camp has just gone money crazy. IMHO, of course.
Heck, I think I'm going to put up one of my more unusual corns I have hatched out recently up for sale for $20,000.
