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"Stargazing"

it's a neurological disorder that causes the snake to seem unbalanced. Depending on the severity the snake may not be able to hold its head up, or it may seem to move in jerky movements. I've heard of some people "Putting down their snakes" with this disorder rather than trying to care for them. I don't know much more about it, fortunately it's rare and most of us will never have to deal with it.

Link below shows a video of Stargazing Corn Snake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL-arBm9Qxw
 
That pretty much covers it. Though I have a bit of a beef with a lot of the European breeders' attitude about Stargazer. Many of them are quite passionate in their disdain or disgust for American breeders having spread it abroad and widely in the US too, by their lights purely out of greed, almost as if it were deliberate. And undoubtedly, some breeders did, but it's a lot more complicated than a number of them like to make out.

At first it was thought to be connected to Sunkissed like the pied gene is to diffused and though that had been proven to be wrong years ago, that info wasn't (and still isn't) widely circulated, especially to those just getting into corns and breeding. I know that for several years after I got into corns back in '08, I thought it was connected too, though that had been disproven for several years, I believe, before '08. So I, and I'm sure, many other newbies assumed that, hey I don't have any Sunkissed corns, not something I need to worry about and with all these other genes to learn about, not something that must be investigated further. So, lots of breeders for years didn't know that they needed to worry about all of their non Sunkissed corns being hidden carriers for it if they came from Sunkissed lines, and spread it out all over, in theory it could now pop up in just about any line.

Plus the European breeders seem to think it should have been easily eradicated had the American breeders just been ethical and dedicated and done what was needed by testing as many, preferably all of their breeder animals, and also undoubtedly, that idea has some merit.
But many people didn't know that they even needed to test their animals for one thing. For another, ideally to be as sure as possible, you should test your individual breeders twice, which means two years lost for each one that you test. And they often say that everyone breeding should test ALL of their animals and clear them before breeding any to sale, which would have put an end to the business of all the big breeders that actually live on that income and hurt the smaller ones that make some part of their living from breeding their snakes.
The only breeders that could have easily done that with their breeder animals, other than the other complications outlined below, would be the hobby breeder with only a few. They would also be those least likely to know they needed to or how to go about it though.
Worrying about that probably does make those breeders less than 100% ethical and above board but it's hard to blame them for having to consider doing the absolutely best thing for the entire captive population versus stopping nearly the entire captive breeding of US corns for 2 to 10 years while they destroyed that gene and all went bankrupt. If it was a really terrible gene, that might have moved more to go to that extreme but while not something that is good to see, many homo gazers live long and seemingly comfortable lives.

The other two issues is for the best breeding trial results, you want to use a homo gazer to test your other corn. And there just aren't enough breeding age homo gazers out there for everyone to test all of their corns and it's not like people want to make a lot more of them on purpose. Closely related, to do things in the best way, you should euthanize all of the offspring from the test pairings, as limiting the spread of the gene is the whole point and there's no other way to guarantee that all those hets you just made will not end up being bred. Most people breeding corns are doing it because they love corn snakes, asking everyone to be responsible for destroying that many otherwise perfectly healthy baby snakes is heart breaking. Many of the breeders out there can't make themselves test breed their snakes unless there's very good reason to believe their's might be carriers, not because they are greedy but because they are way too softhearted to do it.

All that said, that is why we really, really need another way other than breeding trials to spot the hets out there. Until there is one, Stargazer is not likely to be totally removed. Many people are eagerly awaiting the day that breeding trials will not be needed!
 
Thanks for the information, you guys were really informative! At least it is pretty rare.. Still, sounds pretty awful.
 
Thank you for that very detailed and heartfelt analysis, Tavia. I knew some of it, and the reasons against doing breeding trials very well stated. I hope a simple genetic test for it is devised soon.
 
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