Some thoughts on Anerythrism...
 

I've been taking some photos for the update of my SerpenCo site for this season and while going through the photos trying to pick out the best ones, I found myself staring at a photo of an 'A' Anerythristic and my mind began to wander (easy to do when you get past 50 years old!).

Anyway, I've always found myself describing Anerythism as a genetic trait that removes the reds and oranges from a corn snake. But is that really accurate? If you would take a normal colored corn and remove the reds and oranges, would you REALLY have that much black and gray left behind? I sincerely doubt that reds and oranges mask the melanin and their removal would allow them to be visible.

What appears to happen is more like a displacement of the reds and oranges with melanin. In otherwords, the reds and oranges are REPLACED by melanin.

I played around with photoshop tonight and found that by taking a typical looking corn snake (Hypo Okeetee):
http://www.cornsnakes.com/pics/test/test00.jpg

And removing the red pigment by adjusting the brightness of the pigment to white out the red, you get what would be a corn snake if you extracted the red coloration (anerythristic):
http://www.cornsnakes.com/pics/test/test01.jpg

Then further playing around, I discovered that by transforming the red hue to yellows, I get what looks like an excellent version of an Amber Corn:
http://www.cornsnakes.com/pics/test/test02.jpg

To further confuse things, I then changed the yellow pigment to green and produced yet another decent looking Amber corn with a different color formula:
http://www.cornsnakes.com/pics/test/test03.jpg

So what about removing the yellow pigment? What would that produce? Well, kind of a rather normal looking corn snake:
http://www.cornsnakes.com/pics/test/test04.jpg

Or how about just reducing the brightness of the red to zero? What would that do:
http://www.cornsnakes.com/pics/test/test06.jpg

So it appears we can get quite a variance in the corn snakes just by adjusting the hue, saturation, and brightness of just the red and yellow pigments.

Hmm, what do we get if we remove BOTH the red and yellow pigment:

http://www.cornsnakes.com/pics/test/test05.jpg

Beats me why I spent so much time doing this tonight. But it is interesting to use a graphics program like Photoshop to try to figure out what we are dealing with. However, try as I might, I just could not get anything to look like a Lavender corn. Maybe I just didn't put enough time into it, but I would think this would be possible to do.

So back to the original question: Is Anerythrism REALLY a correct term for what we are seeing in this cultivar?

Interesting...
 

It's accepted that each pigment type in reptiles has an associated pigment carrying cell in a normal animal... Melanin is sequestered in melanophores for example...

What you seem to be suggesting, and have given me a great deal to think about... Is that, in some species displaying certain traits that we lump together visually under a common name... The pigment may not be produced but the cells that are present end up with a pigment in them anyway, even if it's not the type that we normally attribute to the cell...

It's been semi-accepted in amelanistic animals for years, the thought having been that the melanin just "covered up" the other pigment cells... But when looking at the lighter pigments where the visual we get on a "normal" obviously isn't the case...

Innerestin' to be sure.

One of these days I'm going to take the time to read up on how pigments are displaying in corn snakes. I believe Dr. Bechtel's book would be the logical place to start, as his profession being a dermatologist would certainly give him a very good grounding of the mechanics of what we call 'color'.

We don't know what the genes are doing that we are working with. And we are trying to predict the results of combinations without having the base levels defined. What the heck makes a Lavender corn? Is something missing from a Caramel, or added, that changes the visible hues? What about xanthism? It appears to be completely independent of everything else, but is there an Xanthism gene or an Axanthism gene? Is it dominant or recessive?

We can basically say the a normal corn's coloration is dominant to all of the known genetic types we are working with, but what exactly does that mean? WHAT colors and their expressions that make up a normal corn are we really talking about?

The fun part of all this, is that we can't HELP but be surprised by many of the results we get. Because we don't have ANY basic theories to guide us except the empirical data we have observed over the years.

For instance:

I bred 'A' Anerythrisics het for Lavender together the last couple of years. I had regular Lavenders hatch out among a majority of Anerythristics. This would seem to indicate that the Lavender gene overpowers the 'A' Anerythristic gene.

I bred Snow corns het for Lavender together the last couple of years, and thus far ALL of the babies look like regular run of the mill Snows. Not a one looks like a typical Amelanistic Lavender (Opal Corn), which is contrary to what I would expect, based on the results noted above.

So here we have a case where Lavender appears to overpower 'A' Anerythrism UNLESS Amelanism is also present, in which case Lavender has no effect on 'A' Anerythrism, or else it is obscured.

So is Lavender a melanin reducer that a melanin remover (Amelanism) foils the expression of? And Lavender also apparently alters the expression of erythrin as well. Otherwise a melanin reducer ALONE would be a Hypomelanistic. So what EXACTLY is the Lavender gene doing? Then HOW THE HECK can I be producing Amelanistic Lavenders (Opal Corns) that are significanly different looking from Snows?

The LACK of Anerythrism is necessary for an Opal to be expressed. Adding Anerythrism REMOVES the colors seen in an Opal.

Is the Lavender gene BOTH Hypomelanistic AND Hypoerythristic?

I won't EVEN get into the apparent expression of a likely Xanthism gene popping up lately in the Lavenders as well....

:nuts:

Once you start to think about codominant, dominant, and recessive genes, and how there can be more than one allele for each locus, and the statistics of chromosome linkage and crossing-over... well, it just makes my head hurt. The species I mainly work with, Kenyan sand boas, only has 3 proven genetic traits, and that confuses me enough! Well, it doesn't help that one of those traits is paradox albino.
But that is an interesting observation, and if you figure anything out let us know! Cornsnakes always seem to pave the way for the rest of the snake morphs.

Erin B.

I would be happy to, but something tells me that I will know less next year then I know right now... ;)

I haven't got a clue concerning Lavenders, but I do remember what I like to call a "brain fart" concerning aneryth A. It was in a response to a post on your cornsnakes forum and I also thought that "anerythrism" was a misnomer. I thought it odd that if you took a normal corn and simply removed all the red, how do you explain all the black in the saddles? If all that black was there to begin with, no amount of red would be able to show through, but it does in a normal corn. And how do you explain all the varying shades of anerythrism, even in the same clutch? I think something else is involved which governs how much melanin is going to be produced. And perhaps there is another color involved as well which may explain why some ghosts show alot of pink (pastel) and others don't.

I've attached a pic of a female aneryth A that shows alot of color and not that much black. Add the hypo gene to her and you'ld get a very pretty pastel ghost. Siblings from the same clutch and other clutches by the same parents or a different mate with each parent show varying degrees of blackness and "background" color from classic solid black saddles on silver/gray to appearing like ghost corns. I've only kept 2 females of this colorful aneryth A type and I have 1 male that looks like a ghost, but isn't. I've only bred the male to one of the females once, got a small clutch, and only a few aneryths (both snakes are het snow and most hatchlings ended up being snows...Murphy's law). Those few aneryth hatchlings didn't seem to be anything spectacular, typical aneryths, but they were all sold and may look different now since all 3 I kept didn't start to look different until after several sheds, and kept lightening up until about 6 months of age. Many further breeding trials may show if the characteristics are reproducable or not.

I know this is an old thread, but I was digging around back here, and this one caught my eye.
It defenitely gives me a headache thinking of all the possibilities.
Maybe, the founding anery's werent pure. Does anybody have photo's of the first aneries. Were they any different from the ones produced today. Or maybe the first "anery" was actually a double homozygous form of two wild traits, and all we have uncovered was a lesser anery trait on it's own. It would be hard to only get 1 morph out of a bouble het breeding, such as what you;d get from normal X double homozygous, but like proven over the years, not impossible....

There may just be more than one gene involved with anery A, and perhaps even the same thing as with the ultramels (2 genes for different color on the same locus). And if there are 2 gene loci, each with their pair of co-dominant forms, it could explain why there is such a wide range of color variation in the anery A.

Let me try to explain this possible theory genetically:

First gene locus with homozygous gene pair WW = black anery A
First gene locus with homozygous gene pair XX = light brown
First gene locus w/ heterozygous gene pair WX = medium brown
Second gene locus w/ homo gene pair YY = dark brown/pink
Second gene locus w/ homo gene pair ZZ = light brown/pink
Second gene locus w/ heterozygous pair YZ = med brown/pink

Start mixing things up with both loci affecting the color = all the shades we see. And it could explain why there can be a wide range of shades in the same clutch and/or from the same parents year after year.

I bred the above pictured anery A het ghost female to my high pink ghost male this year. The resulting clutch of 11 didn't show a higher percentage of light colored/pink anerys or ghosts. I only kept 1 ghost female from this clutch and, although she does show some nice pink, it isn't too spectacular.

I'll have several more anerys of various shades in breeding for 2005, so the results may change with a higher number of offspring to judge.

Mike - This light anery A female is the mother of the amel female we both like (and you're getting). Could her lighter coloration also be affecting the color of the amel offspring? That amel daughter sure stands out when she's compared to the other amel hatchlings from various clutches. HMMM...perhaps yet another gene that affects the intensity of red/orange/pink...could explain Rich's Fluorescent Oranges as well as the high pink ghosts and snows...and the lavenders and hypo lavs with alot of pink/peach.

ARGH!! BRAIN OVER-LOAD!!! Must....shut....down.......go....to.........sleep.

And for anyone else reading this revived thread...here's the amel hatchling that Mike is getting.

And that theoretical intensifying gene could work like a 3-way bulb, depending upon dominance, co-dominance, recessivness,
to just lightly tweek the color, or punch it, or to totally blow it away!

Now I must REALLY go to bed!