Motley x Motley breeding question

I would love to see photo documentation. Hope you find them.

Oh - and I was mistaken on the numbers...it was 5 out of 13 that were afflicted. It was 2 that got treated topically, 1 injected, 1 both, 1 something else. Sorry about that; but I did tell you I was fuzzy on the details due to the time lapse.

In my experience, the eye issues in albinos is not due to inbreeding or breeding albino to albino, but is caused by a physiological issue stemming from the lack of melanin in the animal. Basically, all tyrosinase negative albinos have a chance of having the eye problems. I've seen the eye problems in Sharps as well as Kahls, in unrelated het x het breedings on multiple occasions. It just is a fact of life in breeding albinos. I've found that albino litters are generally less robust than non-albino litters in general on top of the eye problems.

Bred albino (mom) x het (dad), probably related - I bought them second hand, they came from PKahl originally, he confirmed but wouldn't deny or confirm if they were littermates. She dropped a bit premature, the litter was not that hardy, had slugs and a few severly kinked stillborns. Of the survivors (none had kinks), a few died in the first few weeks. The ones that made it did fine, I still have one of the males. This was '02 I think. Luckily I didn't have any with eye issues but the kinked stillborns and seeing the weak ones die off was not pleasant.

Bred unrelated normal x the albino male from above and all the het babies were fine.

A local guy I knew bred quite a bit of albinos x unrelated hypo hets and such, he had mixed results. Some great, some disasters. I adopted a one-eyed sunglow from him that he didn't have the heart to cull. I believe she was born with one eye. He had some buggy eyes too. He stopped breeding a few years ago.

I would hope it doesn't happen as much as it used to with more outcrossing (because Harald is correct, they all stem from one founding animal) but I don't keep up in the breeding circles like I used to, to really give any feedback on that. Just know that it's something to be aware of. If you get bad eyes or kinks, don't repeat the breeding IMO.

Good luck!

There's a guy out of Mexico that posted his clutch which produced some nice Sunglow Motleys, a Super Motley, and an Albino Super Motley. In the pics the supers looks perfect as well. A few people asked for updates on the supers but he only updated the Sunglows. Not sure if this means anything but hopefully with the outcrossing mentioned and stronger genes being bred into the pool things are heading in the right direction.

There's a reason he updated with only pics of sunglows. I feel, with the large amount of evidence at hand, that purposefully putting animals together that will make super motleys is the single most irresponsible act a boa breeder can engage in. 99.9% of them die long, agonizing deaths and the one that I know of that did make it is extremely unhealthy in appearance.

I personally cannot come up with a reason to do it besides fulfilling some personal wish and when you put your own interests ahead of the animals, nothing good comes of it.