Bug-eyed boas

Is it just my imagination, or am I seeing more and more noticeably bugeyed boas these days? Maybe they aren't as bad as the leucistic Texas rats were at one time, but it seems pretty pronounced.
Doesn't anybody outcross, or put some effort into using unrelated pairs for breeding any more? WTF is the matter with people (and people wonder why I don't usually offer "pair pricing" on littermates)

I haven't noticed it myself but then again I'm too broke to cruise ads. We've ( me & Lolo ) have talked about it extensively tho. While we do hold back from our litters we have plans to get more stock unrelated from ours for outbreeding. Even our albino / sunglow projects are completely unrelated due to the way albinos have been bred & sold in the past.

I would think some don't care but others , like us , are still in the building stage of some projects and only have related animals from some projects to offer.

The only time id ever buy two related animals from one person was if i had plans with other animals involved. Even with some of my hets now ( i know this is boas, but i think this mode of thinking involves all the animals we keep) i plan on producing visuals from the ones i have now, and trading/selling them, to buy other hets, instead of linebreeding/inbreeding them.

Harald,

A while ago I started becoming concerned about this very same issue (see http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/foru...=albinos+blind ). First it was the albinos although I don't doubt it's probably expanding to other morphs as well.

Best

Harald,

I've seen it too....I never said anything, I guess I figured I'm not really a "boa person", so maybe I was just seeing things, you know?

People don't gave a crap these days. It's all about producing that next dollar sign.

I did have an interest in this very subject, and had fully planned on doing some breeding along these lines just for answers. I planned on son back to mom, siblings, and non siblings. Different temps during gestation, etc. until sometime down the road I hit this problem.

I still think for some reason, that though inbreeding early on may have contributed to this somewhat, I still find it strange that none of the earlier albinos seemed to possess this problem. Not until everyone on earth had to produce albinos as quickly as they could. Makes me wonder if this anomaly was introduced from another source, because of all the Albino pairings that have happened with no anomalies what so ever.

Not to discount the accepted theory, as I just ain't smart enough to present a decent argument. But if you think about it, Albinism has been found in cats, dogs, bears, deer, rhinos, hippos, baboons, monkeys, lions, and probably a whole host of other animals I can't list at the moment. Out of them all, you just don't see physical deformities. Blindness and/or deafness are usually the side effect, if any. Not visual deformities. So for this reason, I still wonder, and can't bring myself to blame a mutated gene for the cause.

But I can say, that people who will not cull said deformed animals, are probably the cause for the spread of this anomaly. Once a defect has presented itself physically, the genes responsible for normal formation are obviously mutated, for whatever reason, and just may pass on to offspring. Sorta like you can take an aberrant patterned animal, and selectively breed for that aberrancy until it is predictable in the outcome of the litter. (Dominant genetic stripes come to mind as an example).

That's my 2¢ anyway. Not having Aurora anymore sorta stopped my whole idea about proving, or disproving this claim. But you can't blame a "weak" gene like most tend to do. It's "weak" breeding practices that perpetuate this problem.

I wasn't talking about the one eye, weak eye, small eye thing, or even albinos in particular. I'm talking about the way more and more boas seem to be somewhat bugeyed...bugeyed in the way that seems to be associated with several generations of inbreeding (think leucistic TX rats 10-15 yrs ago). Maybe part of it is just the pictures; but I've seen a fair percentage during personal inspection of certain types of boas at shows, as well.

Yeah, I guess I'm guilty of the automatic relationship to albinos that comes to mind, when eye anomalies are mentioned.

I've seen one or two in the last couple years, that seemed to have somewhat bulgy eyes. They weren't hets either. Which, IMO, lends to what I mentioned above, about it being introduced later on.