New ball pythons morphs/mutations

Another turkey-sized seven-clutch egg sired by “Silver ghost” laid last night! This female belongs to Randy Remington, and is part of a joint-venture breeding project. Just wanted to share with all of you the excitement of an incredible breeding season! It seems this year we will be able to disprove that the trait is co-dominant. It will take a few more years to determine if it’s inherited as simple heterozygous though. One way or the other it’s always fun!

All the best!

Originally Posted by evansnakes

If you take the outcome of 5,000 or 10,000 clutches, while it is far from infinity, it is more than enough for a scientific study to have valid data.

Not to say that it's impossible to have good data without infinite samples, but only that there is no absolute guarantee that total numbers will be equivalent to expected values otherwise. I would bet that if all that data were formally analyzed, they would already be pretty close to the expected values. At least, if you were to graph the distribution you would see some sort of skewing towards the more probable outcomes and away from the less likely ones.

Ball pythons almost never produce 16 eggs and yet so many animals have been produced in multiples out of 5 or 6 egg clutches that are 1 in 16 odds. Also, after looking at many many outcomes there are far more non conforming outcomes (i.e., far more or far less morphs from a breeding than there should be) than the ones you should see through statistics and probability.

Hatching out outcomes different than the expected value should be expected. However, they will balance out with each other. Just as there are 5 or 6 egg clutches with multiple successes on the 1/16 probability, there will be numerous clutches out there with none at all, and eventually there will be a clutch of that size with all successful offspring. Even if there's only a 0.000006% chance of that happening, there will eventually be 167,772 clutches when the expected value will become 1. And that all successful clutch may happen long before that number of clutches are produced or it may happen long after.

I can understand where you're coming from as well. Because it is possible to see any sort of outcome, intuition would lead you to believe that the probability is irrelevant, as results will deviate from the expected values. However, by doing that you would be assuming that all possible outcomes are equally likely to happen, which (although faulty) is a type of probability itself.

It's important to remember that probability does not dictate actual values. If it did, it would be called certainty and not probability. However, without any other information to go by, probability is the best information available when making predictions. Results can, will, and even should deviate, but if you take a look at things in the long enough run, they will eventually even out.

Sorry, that should be 16,777,216 instead of 167,772; I shifted 2 decimal places over for the percentage and forgot to shift it back when calculating the expected value.

I have a buddy that is considering purchasing a pair of triple het honduran milk snakes (I have no idea what their het for). Has anyone messed with tripple hets for BP's and what would be needed to get to that point? One's thing for sure, it's pure roulette on what you'd produce!

Actually there have been a couple triple het ball pythons posted recently - but they where dominant type mutations where the hets are visible so it's sort of cheating. I think one was a spider pinstripe pastel (a visible het for all 3 morphs). This combo was probably made by breeding a double visible het like a pastel spider or a spider pinstripe to the 3rd visible het (pinstripe or pastel respectively). As long as all three mutations prove to be different genes on different chromosomes (I believe this to be proven for pastel and spider) this triple het combo could also be reproduced at the same 1 in 8 odds by breeding this first visible triple het to a normal.

I suspect the Honduran is het for three recessive morphs so probably produced by something like crossing a double homozygous recessive (perhaps snow - anerythristic and amelanistic) X a single homozygous recessive like a tangerine (at least I think that's recessive, not sure). While it’s harder to get the parents to produce known triple het recessives you at least get 100% triple hets out of the clutch where with the ball python dominant type example using het parents it’s only about 12.5% of the clutch that would be expected to be triple hets.

The distribution of offspring sex ratios brings up an interesting point. What if we find out later that something we assume is randomly distributed isn't? The near even long run split of all offspring in the population leads us to assume that the distribution is random. However, I've heard theories that the distribution for an individual male may not be random. The theory is along the lines that the farther the sperm has to swim the more likely male offspring are due to faster male sperm and the less distance it has to swim the more likely female offspring are due to stronger female sperm that can break through the egg wall quicker if they get there about the same time. This may well be an urban legend but it would be interesting to see a chart of a large number of sibling sex ratios to see if it's a nice normal curve with the high point at 50/50 or if it has peaks at either end that happen to balance the average out at 50/50 but indicate that individual parents tend to be skewed.

With snakes it's the female's genetic contribution that determines the gender of the offspring so it would be fun to look at the distribution in ball python clutches and see if it tends to peak at 50/50 or not. If not, it might get us looking into how the female makes her egg cells and might shed some light on the distribution of morph genes by the female too.

You could breed a snow (double homozygous for albino and axanthic) to a hypo or pied and you would produce triple hets.

Has anyone seen any of the stuff posted in Ralph's journal? http://ralphdavisreptiles.com/interactive/journal/

Go back through the past few months, there's Ralph's and new ones from other people. CRAZY STUFF.

Few examples:

WOW!! That Pastel Pied is one AWESOME snake!!!!

Dan and Colette Sutherland produced a pastel pied this year...It's pretty rad looking http://ballpython.com/page.php?topic...esult_Set=0#86
They also produced a super Hypo Mojave
http://ballpython.com/page.php?topic...esult_Set=0#86
Can't copy pics from their site, but they're worth looking at.
Jeremy Conrad

Why are losers allowed to post this kind of garbage? Do you have to pay for the use of the site to sell fake drugs here?