What's the criteria for pricing sexes of morphs?

Looking at the ads the other day I was puzzled by how males and females are priced. There was a proven co-dominant morph where they were asking double for the female. Striclty from a business perspective it doesn't make sense (at least to me). Who in his right mind will pay double for a female of a codominant mutation? Unless a person has a male and wants a female to produce a "super" (pastel ball for example) it makes little sense to pay more for a female. One male can be used to produce several litters, thus it should be valued more, right? If the female is breeding age I would probably accept a price difference but not double ($3,500 vs. $7,000). Any insights?

Alvaro, the female would be worth double because the male can be used to breed w/ more than one female. Only the females actually make you money.

As an example, I breed albino burms. Adult male albino burms sell for about $100-200. At least that's what I've paid for the last 4 I bought, and I only paided $200 for one because it was het for green, the others were all $100. Adult females are worth much more to me. Each egg laid by a female represents $85-$125, so for each female I have I can potentially make thousands of dollars. One male can breed w/ many females. So you just don't need as many.

Males are only worth more early on in the game. Example when a new morph comes out. Because in that case the opposite is true. The male can be bred with more than one female to produce more hets. Once the hets hit the market and ppl get their hands on them the prices start to level out. And then as the morph becomes more and more available the females retain more value than the males.

Brian,

For a codominant mutation (such as the example), if you buy a female you can produce let's say 6 babies. Three of the visual morph and 3 normals. Your investment was $7,000 for the female and you sell $6,000 worth of babies ($2,000 a piece, let's forget about the normals).

If you buy a male for $3,500 you can invest the other $1,500 in 5 $300 huge normal females. Your total investment is now $5,000 but now you produce 3 x 5 = 15 co-dominant mutations at $2,000 a piece = $30,000.

In addition your original co-dominant female may skip one year. The normals you could always buy more. It seems like a no-brainer to me.

Regards.

Brian,

To further expand on the concept. If I was a breeder of a co-dominant morph and would want to maintain the market price I would probably sell as little males as possible. The fact is that males should probably be priced 3 times as high as females as they are the ones that will be siring several females and dropping the market price faster. Needless to say, males arrive to sexual maturity maybe a couple of years before females are ready, so it makes even more sense to invest on males and not females. As a breeder of a co-dominant morph, and if I had the right ratio, I would probably price males higher and sell them in trios or even 1-4 groups.

Regards.

Well, with a dominate morph, everything you have said applies, but with a co-dominate morph there is one other factor that comes into the equation... supers. You mentioned it in your first post, but that is the biggest point with the co-doms.

Look at the spiders. It's pretty certain that is a dominate morph. It may be that a homozygous spider will be proven out, where all the offspring from that snake bred to a normal will be spider, but there is no visible difference.
In this morph, the males are priced higher. Not 2-3 times higher, but higher none the less.

In pastels however, you have a co-dominate trait so you can produce the much coveted supers. This makes the females gold, because the trait acts just like any recessive trait. After all, a pastel is nothing more than a het for super pastel, and just as Brian said, the females make the money. Just going by advertised prices from last year, pastels were around $1000/2000 male/female, but the supers were 15 grand. Very big reason to want those females.
I don't remember when pastels first were proven genetic (at that time it wasn't known whether they were dom or co dom), but I'd say then the males were higher for exactly the reasons you outlined, I could be wrong though.
That trait is to the point now that it's dropping out of the limelight. Once a morph hits the $1000 barrier, it becomes commonplace to find them in collections, and the larger breeders begin to migrate away from them as a priority project.
A lot of the pastels you'll see now from the big breeders will be het for a recessive trait, and the female pastels will be largely held on to for making the supers. The hets will be the products of further morph development (pastel stripe or what have you) and also being het, will again increase the value of the pastels they have for sale.

If I produced some clutches containing pastels, you better believe I'd hang on to several of the females. The supers are valuable within the breeders group as well, not just for the high price tag. Since everything a super produces will be pastel, it puts you on the fast track to getting the pastel trait combined with the recessives.

Those are good points Clay. If makes sense from an economic standpoint to hold on to the females to produce "supers". Then again to produce a "supers" you need both sexes. Why the almost 2X difference? Is that because there are less females in the market?

Regards.

Less females on the market is part of it, but producing supers is just like producing say albinos from hets.
A het albino male runs what, $250? While the females run what $700? The reason is you only need the one male to breed several het females to produce your albinos. It's the same with the pastels, or any other co-dominate morph, they are just visible hets for the "super" form.
All you need is one good breeding male pastel, but you can use all the females you can get, thereofre the females command a higher price.

There are more males on the market because breeders who produce pastels (myself included) will end up holding back most if not all females and maybe one really great patterned males if any at all. That saturates the market with males, and the females are few and far between. Hence the price difference.