inbreeding?

to what extent is inbreeding bad? up untill now ive only ever bred beardies, and in that case ALL inbreeding is frowned upon. but i seem to have picked up on some information implying that slight inbreeding is ok in bps.can you mix siblings?how about half siblings who share the same father?mother to son?son to daughter?and any other helpful tips on breeding in general that anyone has picked up or learned from personal experience would be great. Thanks

I've known corn snake breeders who have inbred for many generations and claim it doesn't matter. Still, some of the more problematic lines of corns are some of the more inbred ones so I figure it's better to avoid if possible.

I'm not sure we have been breeding balls really long enough to know yet. Plenty of parent offspring and sibling breedings have been done and I haven't heard of any problems but I don't think there are any 10th generation inbred balls out there either (like with some corns).

Well Im from west virginia so I say its ok every once in a while...lol..
-Matt

Look at all the ball python morphs out there. a lot of them are ressive traits so the way to get those patterns to come out is by breeding back to one of the parent or sibling. so ball morphs are ingernal inbred. The only thing that I have niticed is that the life span of heavly inbred balls is a shortned a bit.

Not to bust your chops but I'm not sure we have been keeping regular ball pythons long enough to know what their lifespan normally is. I think the record is like 47 years but the vast majority of ball pythons kept now are under 10 years old. We haven't been keeping them in numbers long enough to get a good feel for average lifespan. We also haven't been breeding them enough generations to have any _really_ inbred ones yet.

The oldest captive bred ball morph should be a 12-year-old albino (proven by Bob Clark in 1992). Have you seen morphs dieing at 12 or younger? I think that would be shortened a whole lot based on what little we've seen so far as to how long at least some ball pythons can live.

corn nut All I am saying is that albinism due to inbreeding is a sub fatal genitic disorder. I have not nessarily seen a reduction in reptiles, but for example I have seen this in diffrent species of rats, the albinos have a life span of about 1.9 years average while normals have a life span of 2.5 years average. this shorting of life is just somthing that exists in inbreeding in gernal is all.

sorry to say but bob clark is not the first to breed albinos. my albino stock that I have access to is from a neighbor, he's first albino ball was a WC from back in the early 70's when he was in college. Bob clark was the first to mass breed Ill give you that.

Are you sure the rat example is due to inbreeding and not the rat version of the albino mutation? As many albino rats as there are (many if not most domestic rats are albino it seems) and as long as they have been around I wouldn't assume a particular albino colony was any more inbred than a non-albino captive colony. If the lifespan difference tends to be seen over all colonies then I would suspect it's the albino gene making the difference and not inbreeding. A simple experiment could be done to find out if it’s inbreeding or the albino gene causing the shorter lifespan. Since albino is recessive in rats you could cross between several albino and non albino colonies and then breed the hets back together (perhaps hets from two different albino colonies) and see if the difference in lifespan persists between the third generation albinos and hets and non hets all with the same crossed genetic diversity. The possible hets (breeding could be done to see which are hets and which not) would be exactly as inbred or outbred as their albino siblings so you would just need a big group of them to come up with an average lifespan. Even if it took 4 or 5 years for the whole experiment it would be a lot quicker than the half a century or more to get an answer for ball python life spans. Of course the results of such a rat experiment wouldn’t necessarily mean anything about albino balls. If it turns out that the rat albino gene or something closely linked to it is causing shortened lifespans then the out crossing experiment should prove it. What is your source for the lifespan difference, perhaps they have already done this experiment?

Has your neighbor been breeding albino balls since the 70's or just has a wild bred animal that old that was first bred after Mr. Clark's? Was his albino a hatchling when imported and is it still alive? Such an animal would no doubt be the oldest verified albino and a start for figuring their lifespan.

ablinoism that is due to inbreeding ie daughter bred back to a grand father to bring out a recessive as a higher assoiation of shorter life. does that help?

according to my neighbor the ball python was given to him form a local farmer in africa that had a nest under a porch, it was one of the hatchlings was albino. He ( not sure if how but brought it back to the US) has bred it once is all. The original ball has pass way back in the mid nineties but its off spring are still around. it is one of those that I borrow as a stud.