Hey,
I was contacted by a member to reply to this thread.
First-the animal for sale by Travis Cossette was produced by Paul Mitchell Jr-of New Jersey, with one of my females that I have on loan to him. I am liquidating some projects to raise money and Travis bought this animal from me a couple weeks ago at the orlando show.
Second-The name "calico" is a descriptive term that was given to the mother by Dennis Sargent when I bought her from him in October of 2002. This is not the same as calico balls, or calico retics. The calico name is given to the animal due to it having a majority of three colors-orange, brown, and white. Yes if you look hard enough or scale by scale there is yellow, black, shades of tan, etc etc. But the overall look is a brown body with white highlights and an orange belly with black highlights. It is a coloration trait, not a pattern mutation but it acts like melanistic or hypo where if present in high enough proportion it disrupts the normal pattern.
Again this is a desciptive term so there is some play and people could argue that all hoggs have all of these six colors. However-by looking at the adult female after ontogenic color change that almost all boas go through you can see she is not the run of the mill hogg island.
I have not ever seen any other hoggs that look like her and I have seen lots of hoggs, and talked to a lot of boa people. Dennis has over 50 years in boas, has traveled many of the countries they come from and has been writing a book on boas so I had no reason to ever argue with the name calico as it was written on my reciept from him.
I produced 2 litters of dead babies from the mom one in 04 and one in 05. I was having mediocre sucess with colombians and great success with true redtails so last year before daytona I talked paul inot taking my hoggs since he had a large group and has done quite well with them. He bred his hypo hogg male to them and produced 5 live babies. 1.4 were aberrant hypos, and this female. He delivered the non hypo to me at daytona as part of my "half" I sat on her since and she has started to develope the orange belly so I felt that she is going to turn out like mom and decided the calico moniker was deserved now. Enter Travis, who made me an offer on a group of babies that I said yes to, is now trying to sell it and is keeping the calico name I hope to let the buyer know what lineage it is.
Paul is keeping a trio for breeding(est 2009), and has the third hypo female in his possession that we have thought about selling to get the word out also. However with the hypos we don't know if we will be able to tell if they are calico or not.
Here is a pic of the litter, a pic of moms belly, and a pic of her compared with a regular dark hogg, and a light phase (or I have now seen these listed as pastel hoggs).
IF I had created her I would hae named her a UOT hogg-for Ugly on Top!LOL
thanks
ben cole
Thanks.
On the flip side, I have seen Colombians born, from a trusted line, that were peaked out, and had intense reds like true red tails. So weird things can, and do, happen. 