Paging Kathy Love and Joe Pierce

[Mick]

I have incorporated Sunkissed and Lava into my predictor program... just need to add descriptive info to the help file. Would appreciate if someone (preferably Kathy and/or Joe if you see this) could provide a 50 word or less description of the subjective 'look' of each of these morphs. Not having seen them myself, I'd hate to get it wrong. TIA!
Regards,
Mick (whose head hurts from re-learning four year old code)

 

[kathylove]

Hope this helps -

This is what we sent in to be published in the revised edition of the Cornsnake Manual: (you can take some info from it if you like)

In recent years, hypomelanism has become a whole new can of worms to understand and predict. First, a new type of hypo gene turned up in our own collection of pure Okeetees in the 1990s. It looked very similar to the ‘old’ hypo, except that the individuals had Okeetee patterns and colors with less than the usual amount of black. It has since been dubbed ‘hypo Okeetee’ or ‘sunkissed’ (sometimes spelled ‘sunkist’) Okeetee. Rich Zuchowski was the first to breed the two types together and produce all normals, proving them to be separate genes. ( And then we have a paragraph about the "stargazing" trait that some of the hypo okeetees pass on to their offspring)

AND:

There is a third type of hypo that has been proven to be incompatible with the first two types. Known originally as the ‘trans (transparent) hypo’, but more recently referred to as a ‘lava’ corn, it may (or may not) also be the same as corns marketed as ‘ultra hypo’. The test breeding between ‘ultra’ and ‘trans’ / lava should be completed by the summer of 2004 and will prove or disprove their compatibility.

Lavas originated from some wild-caught corns from Jasper County, SC that were sold by Gordon Schuett to Joe Pierce of California in 1992. The hypos that resulted from those corns (much like the ‘ultra hypo’ lines) have a somewhat different look from the other two types; a kind of milky translucence to the black pigments. They generally look lighter in color overall than other hypos, almost like dark amelanistic corns with dark eyes. This line has already been crossed into anerythristics, resulting in a combination known as “Ice Ghost.” Joe Pierce and other breeders are in the early stages of combining it with other simple recessive morphs such as charcoal, lavender, and caramel, and it appears that this hypo may produce very bright and different looking multi-trait animals.

 

[Mick]

Thanks Kathy! (nm)

.

 

[ecreipeoj]

Lava Corns

To describe a Lava Corn you have to think about a Lava flow. This is why I settled on the Lava Corn name, because it is so descriptive. Many different shades of orange and yellow with mixed in amounts of translucent obsidian looking purplish gray. The Lava Hypo gene results in a corn which is somewhere in between a normal and amel corn, except that the orange/red colors of the amel are also reduced somewhat. All of the colors of the stock they come from are effected by the lava gene and not just the black pigment, which is more than the amel gene does.

Some Standard Hypos and the light normal corns they come from can look similar. The Lava Corns look very different from the Okeetee stock they came from. There is just no confusing the two, much like an Amel Okeetee is so much different than an Okeetee Phase Corn.

I have just been comparing Kathy’s Sunkissed Okeetees with my Lava’s due to the up coming breeding season and they are as distinctive as and Amel Okeetee from a Sunkissed Okeetee. I was wondering what I was going to do with the Normal double het Sunkissed/Lava that I produced last year. I first thought that it would be difficult to pick out the different hypo genes, but now I feel that this will be as easy as distinguishing between and amel and hypo. The problem will be trying to select a double homo Sunkissed/Lava and of course all of the offspring will be possible hets for one or the other of the two hypo genes involved. This will just have to be kept track of and time will tell if a double homo Sunkissed/Lava Corn is different enough from a Lava to be worth pursuing. The double homo amel/lavas are different in that the colors of the amel are softened, but they are very similar to a regular amel.


I think Aztec Lava Corns will look much more like a Lava Flow.