Heterozygous traits, how much would you pay for 100% reassurance?

They're right Cathy. I composed my response as if I didn't know you at all, and had never heard your name until I saw your ad for het pieds.
Based on the way in which you present yourself on this forum I personally wouldn't have a problem buying hets from you, and I'm sure that's true for many who are familiar with you here.
If you're breeding your visual to a het female then you'll have visual offspring for sale as well which will also add to your credibility to those who don't know you at all.

We all know that the paternity proof is pretty straight forward, right?

What would happen if a breeder sold his heterzygous animals with the DNA profile of either sire or dam (either one or both visual morphs)?

If the father is a male he can use copies of the same DNA profile to sell all the offspring of that male. All a buyer has to do is run a DNA profile on his animal and check with the DNA profile supplied by the seller.

What makes it even easier in reptiles is that sheds or scutes can be used as samples for DNA testing.

Not fool proof but nevertheless interesting. Good discussion!

Regards.

Well, there are two problems with a paternity/maternity test:

1- If I find out after the fact that it's not from the father they say it is, and they know that they could be "busted" by such a test, don't care, and still sell fraudulently, it is a ridiculous amount effort involved in trying to rectify things, and I would not trust that I'd ever see the money back even with all the effort having been expended. I appreciate Lucille's optimism in these matters, but you cannot (legally) physically force someone to pay even with a judgement against them.

2- In order to be able to run a paternity/maternity test, the seller already has to be a participant in the process, since they are (presumably) in possession of the parents. This is still easy enough for scammers to scam, since the people running the testing lab will never have physical access to the specimens in question. In cornsnakes there is a much simpler solution that is no more open to fraud, and doesn't cost $50 per animal... here's an example: http://www.herpregistry.com/acr/Registry.php?idnum=81

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As far as a genotype test, that would be many many times more valuable for breeders than a paternity test could ever be for buyers. At this point it would be stupid for me to cross a quintuple het for amel, anery, motley, hypo, and lavender to, say, a triple het for diffused motley charcoal, because I would get a bunch of hatchlings that were basically "normals and motleys, plus you gotta try to figure out which, if any, of the other 6 genes they're het for before you could even plan anything, plus you'd have to keep a bunch of them for 3 years just to figure out if any of them are even worthwhile."

(Yes, these are real-life examples, and most of my snakes are het or homo for 3-5 mutants.)

I also have a snow motley that is possible het for lavender, and possible het or homo hypo. I would like to make hypo lavender motleys with her, but I don't even know if she carries the right genes. It would be worth at least $50 to know her genotype today, so I can decide whether or not to invest another 2 years into raising her up.

It would be a great advantage to be able to use hets as breeders with the knowledge of the genotypes of their offspring. You could produce morphs based on recessive traits with the same breeding strategies used for dominant genes. That's a huge deal.

I apologize for seeming a bit thin-skinned in my last post, and thank those of you who left kind words. It just gets discouraging some days...the rotten scammers out there who make it difficult for someone trying to get started as a completely honest person. I guess I still have a hard time believing what lengths some of these scammers will go to just to make a few bucks.

That said, I still believe that if done properly, this could be of some aid in weeding out some of the bad guys at least, it's just a matter of closing the loopholes....which I suppose is easier said than done. And as Coyote posted, they DO have some testing already in horses for certain color genes, etc...I think it's something worth developing and working toward in the future.

This is a very interesting topic! I am a bit confused about what exactly I am supposed to be placing my vote on.

I agree with some of you though, I'd pay $100 to $150 to be sure my hets really carried the gene they're het for, but I'm not sure if that's actually what's being proposed. I'm very new to ball pythons (bought my first about a year ago) and I do plan on breeding morphs. I have two hets, I bought them from a well known breeder, but I prefer to build friendly relationships with people I buy my animals from, which is why I prefer to buy from the little guys. With all the scammers that are out there it's very hard to trust anyone, so some kind of genetic proof would be great, if that is what's being proposed.

If we're talking about parental testing, I see no real use for it with breeders, and since nonbreeders probably aren't buying hets, I doubt that's what's being proposed.




Jennifer and Dereck

In my opinion we are not that far away from having something like this being a reality. It's only a matter of getting the right testing company involved, and an interest by a few progressive breeders. The picture ID was proposed for the first time right here in Faunaclassifieds. Although it started slowly it's use is now widespread. It was a huge step forward in the right direction but, as we have seen lately, far from being fool proof. Again the paternity would not be fool proof either, but I would feel far more confident in purchasing an heterozygous animal that comes with a picture ID, its DNA profile and that of the sire and/or dam.

Regards.

I voted $150. I feel if you are just not 100% sure, but want it, and the $150 makes you feel more secure than do it.

I personally agree with clays point. if i don't trust, i don't buy.

If you get a judgement in court, the court gives you a piece of paper that states Mr/Mrs. X owes you $$$ My friend was recently embezzled from by her bookkeeper. over 40k over one yr. it took her TWO more years and disgustingly large amounts of her personal time to recover just 25k ( the amt of the bond) and she pd the lawyer about 8k...net recovery 17k....when we figured her hrs spent on this....22 dollars an hr....thats what she recovered of her own money that she earned. bleeping sick(and the person is still free)....

Sooooo... if i scrape and save and invest 3 5 or even 10k to get started breeding some cool high dollar morphs and get taken by some corrupt breeder.... i as an average ( or even above average) hobbyist/breeder/enthusiast am not going to be able to afford to goto court. even with concrete evidence....oh and by the way the $$$ recovered by my friend was from the bond...not the free crook...ponder that and think about self regulation....document EVERYTHING you purchase...and if you get taken by someone...tell the world so that person goes belly up...but back it up w/copies of the ad, all correspondence etc etc...we don't need slandering...we need to regulate our own industry and the joke courts be damned

Aaron,

Point well taken. Every now and then we hear people saying they are going to sue someone over $500. Caution is still the best approach and if in spite of it you become the victim of a scam juts let the rest know. You may not recover what you lost, but at least you will be helping others. As far as the topic of this thread goes there was not much interest of the company to work on this. We are probably just a drop in the bucket compared to other, more traditional, pets.

Regards.

Hi All,

I wish I had gotten in on this thread earlier.

I work at the University of Florida as a Biological Scientist in the Molecular Genetics Department. Genotyping is 50-60 percent of my job. I am tinkering with some genotyping of reptiles now. I am working with several species of snakes, and I will be working with a couple of large scale producers that have multiple generations of the same mutation plus het and wildtype siblings available. Of course we will be ball focused in the end, but I am looking at corns as the template becuase it is easier to ask for a scale clip from an albino motley corn than it is from a snow spider ball.

I am also working out if sheds are viable instead of scale clips.

Genotyping is a very easy procedure and I could teach a ten year old to do it, and it only takes a couple of minutes of work and a few hours in a cycler. What is difficult is locating the location, and dna sequence of the mutation. Also is it a single mutation in one spot, or is it a shift over lots of modifier genes-and if modifier genes which ones are needed and which ones are not for the mutation to be expressed. All these need to be worked out before we can say that what we see on the agorose gel at the end of the day is indeed what we were really looking for.

We are a ways away and like I said I am just tinkering with it in my spare time. However, there are other services that require genotyping over at the vet school and I believe the charge is right in the $130 range.

However, the problem, still lies with the validity of the seller.

For example, I could genotype 10 balls for someone and come out with 5 hets. What is there to say that he doesn't take the results, duplicate the het documents and fabricate the norms into het documents? Or if I am recieving packages of sheds or scale clips, how do I know that breeder x has not sent me 10 clips from the same het whatever snake, and then uses the documents to represent 10 ch norms?

If people can forge drivers licenses, money, and paintings, they sure as heck can forge a validation certificate from a lab.

Thanks
ben