Scalesless Heads- Do they have a strong future?

The prices for scaless heads are going down. Faster than I would of thought. They were very pricey and they went down to 20k for a morph + scaless. Now I see one breeder selling them for 6K(simple morph). Are they a good investment? Are their genetics good; Strong? to be good breeders? To continue their lineage? I ask these questions because of what I am seeing? What do you think or have heard. Is everyone who bought them still happy? Are breeders who bought them from another breeder when they were high, do they still have a warm and fuzzy professional relationship? Is this a proceed with caution if you have lots of liquid assets? Thanks, Stan

Those questions are hard to answer since Scale less heads are still fairly new. But think about it this way, even though they are newer, you see them everywhere. So a lot of breeders already have them and the price will just drop from there. Issues with the snakes haven't really been exposed yet, as far as I know. But there is at least 1 anatomical mutation with the the pure scaleless, but no idea how it actually affects the snake long term. But I see this kinda acting like the Banana, lots of breeders will jump in and mass produce, destroying the market for it.

You must have missed the the fiasco at Daytona. LOL
The male scaleless that BHB has looks like crap. The female is nowhere to be found and Brian won't talk about it.
The people who got in early are less than thrilled with how the project has been handled.
Winston will hopefully have full scaleless this year from his breedings.
There are many scaleless head combos already. Pastel, spider, pied, etc.
The price drop is because back door deals are now in the open. There are a few sellers offering the lower pricing.
Personally, I don't like the completely scaleless one and have a feeling there will be viability issues with it.

Originally Posted by SPJ

You must have missed the the fiasco at Daytona. LOL
The male scaleless that BHB has looks like crap. The female is nowhere to be found and Brian won't talk about it.
The people who got in early are less than thrilled with how the project has been handled.

Have not heard about this. Is there a thread about this already? I'm nosy lol

Yes, please Steve, can you expand on that? I was at Daytona and saw Mr. Smooth and was surprised at how many scaleless heads were available given how new the gene is to the market. I didn't think the scaleless ball that was at the show looked bad?? Granted, I didn't take much more than a passing glance at it.

Way too many threads to post links to. Sean Bradley, Mike Wilbanks and few others are not happy with Brian.
Here is what they had on display. Where is the female? Every time BHB is asked he goes into a rant and basically tells the people who are heavily invested from the beginning to go to hell.

One more. Sad shape and that thing is 2 years old.

Hmm, I'll have to defer to your experiences with Brian. It's hard to tell from the photo if the skin on the snake's back is incompletely formed scales (like we see in other scaleless snakes) or actual skin problems. Without seeing a shed it's hard for me to know.

I didn't realize a female had also been produced? I was only aware of the one male.

Also, with a sample size of only 1 (perhaps 2, depending on the nature of the female, or 3 if we count the scaleless ball that showed up years ago but died), it's hard to definitively say if there are health issues tied to the gene. I have some ball pythons that no matter what I do are just slow growers. I have a three year old male who is only 700 grams, for example (he was a mouser for ages but thankfully just switched to rats, so I'm hoping he'll make up for lost time).

I'm not saying those of you heavily invested into the project are not justified in being frustrated or worried, but I'm not completely convinced the project is worth abandoning just yet. With all the scaleless heads at Daytona, I'm guessing we'll know for certain the behavior of this gene in the next year or so.

Brians attitude is what is causing problems with the project. There was the original one years ago that was a female that died, 2 females that the bessettes had died, and now the female sib to this male is MIA and BHB won't let anyone know what happened to it.
Basically he has been horrible with the project and people like Sean who paid $50K to get into the project wanted answers.
Hopefully Winston will be a better steward of the scaleless project because BHB dropped the ball big time and alienated a lot of current and future customers into the scaless project.
Personally, I don't care for the animal. But I do see where people want answers. This screams that things are being withheld like what happened with the desert project.

Thanks for explaining things, Steve. I agree that this is all starting to remind me of the desert fiasco. I hope it doesn't end up turning out that way for everyone who invested so heavily in the project. I guess we'll know in the next year or so what's going on.