My anxiety level is through the roof!

[HerpsOfNM]

Jen, take my breeding last year of Peppermint Stripe x Tessera. The tessera was sold as heterozygous amel, heterozygous stripe. Well, I got ZERO amels, and a bunch of babies that I was like, WTF is that??? Oh- motley. I never hatched a motley before So out of those however many motleys, statistically, 50% should also be tessera. There were also quite definite tesseras. I wonder if I posted the pics...

Here's the thread. Keep in mind that as these hatched, I didn't now that the female was NOT heterozygous stripe or amel. I'm going to have to go read it and see how much of a dumb-ass I was...

edit: not too bad! So- there are tesseras, normals, and motleys. Statistically, some of those motleys should be tesseras. Doesn't mean they are! I have no idea where they are now. Carol had them all, and most likely they were sold overseas.

I've venture this little corn worm might be tessera....

http://www.cornsnakes.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1591968&postcount=18

I'm keying in on the "chevy" logo side blotches for that assumption.

 

[Christen]

I'm not confident in completely ruling tessera out genotypically. Phenotypically I don't recall any of the supposed motley tesseras looking like yours, particularly with what Nanci is hinting at about everyone's believed/possible animals.

I say this going off of a recent clutch I had hatch. I paired my current only mature male tessera to a granite. Of 11 fertile eggs, I hatched 1 normal tessera, 1 hypo (surprise! my tessera het butter stripe is het hypo too), and 9 normal corns. So looking just at the tessera mutation, 1 tessera and 10 non-tessera. I definitely wasn't expecting that given the almost 50/50 tessera to non-tessera ratio I got from last year's clutches.

You know that is why I didn't count the tess out till each egg was open. I know sometimes Murphy is a jerk. I was going to breed him to another female known not to have motley but she always throws big clutches and the last thing I wanted was 25+ normal amel babies if he didn't prove any of his possible hets. I am fairly confident calling him a normal motley with this clutch just cause I should have gotten at least one tess in this clutch if he was in fact a tess.

Has anyone actually proved a snake that is motley in appearance (no belly checkers, motley dorsal pattern) to also be tessera- Someone must have at some point as we are calling these motleys "possible tesseras", right?
I agree there really should be a thread about this.

I can't recall seeing any threads that they have proved. I see few where people claim they are but I haven't seen anything proving it. Like you said somebody must have by now.

I will say I am more confident that my "striped possible tessera" will turn out to be a tessera as opposed to my "motley possible tesseras" which look like any motley to me.
Christen did say something interesting about Jester in post #1,

I've seen a lot of variation on the patterns of motleys but I'd be interested to know more about this or any markers on the side.

That was the #1 thing that had me convinced as a baby. In each one of his spots that is wider than the tess stripe looked like a tessera. Thin orange line that took up half a scale, whole scale and half a scale with white on each side. :shrugs: I really wish I would have gotten a picture of it when he was younger.

 

[Christen]

I've venture this little corn worm might be tessera....

http://www.cornsnakes.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1591968&postcount=18

I'm keying in on the "chevy" logo side blotches for that assumption.

That is another thing that was like "oh yeah has to be a tessera" for Jester and another one I have here is they both have those markings down their sides.

 

[HerpsOfNM]

That was the #1 thing that had me convinced as a baby. In each one of his spots that is wider than the tess stripe looked like a tessera. Thin orange line that took up half a scale, whole scale and half a scale with white on each side. :shrugs: I really wish I would have gotten a picture of it when he was younger.

If I'm following you, that's similar to why I think my butter stripe from last season may still indeed be a butter stripe tessera. If I look close enough, I can see a faint 1 scale wide white border within the inner portion of the tessera "stripe" (as Don points out, this isn't a stripe, but the background color). My original hypothesis, that seemed to quickly get squashed was that the inner background color of the tessera stripe was 3 scales wide.

A friend, and the TA of 2 botany labs had a phrase for hard to key out plants within the Asteraceae family. When asked what a plant was that fell within that family, his generic answer was, "Yup, that's a stupid Asteraceae!" I think I'm just going to stop trying to wrap my head around tessera and respond with, "Yup, that's a corn snake." :dgrin: :sidestep:

EDIT....

I'd have to go gleam through a buttload of photos and pick others minds, but doesn't motley typically reduce out the traditional black border of blotches?....case in point http://www.cornsnakes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=132897&page=14

Sorry, so many variables are flying through my head. The other question is I've seen hints that there was a publication done on how snake patterning develops at the molecular level and then subsequently arranges into a given pattern. The question, where is such publication and is there much for and against it; i.e., are there publications that agree and/or rebut for forming an unbiased opinion?