Eryx colubrinus, a small mini-morph project and some genetics

Sandboa's are not as popular as ball-pythons or boa's but they also have an interresting range in colour and patterns. They don't need a lot of room so they make a nice candidate for a small morph project on your own for fun. Note that this project is not new, we just replicate a project for the fun of it.

We (I often work together with some friends) have put a male albino (missing black or amelanistic) together with a wild-coulour Female that we raised ourselves (picture 3), so that she had no contact with a wild-colour male. This resulted in a nice litter of babies (picture 1)! These should be 100% het-albino and they are all wild colour offcourse. If we breed these babies together the result would be:
in genotype (genetics): 25% albino; 25% pure wild-colour; 50% het-albino This means in fenotype (how they look) 25% albino and 75% wild. If we consider these wild-colored babies without the albino siblings then we have 33% wild-colour and 66% hets. This is why wild-couloured siblings from heterozygote parents are called 66%possible-hets (actually 66.66%).

But we prefer breeding these 100% het- females with an albino male to create only albino's and hets and no "possibles". breeding an albino to a het-albino gives 50% albino's and 50% het-albinos and no full wild coulours.

We have a similar project with a wild coulour female and an anerythristic male. so we will be creating 100% het-anery's soon. Only our anery-male is actually a hypo-melanistic anerythristic sandboa (picture 2), that means that he is not black/white as he should be but black/brown (hypomelanistic means less-black). Because I don't know if the hypomelanistic trait is genetic, we will consider him just anerythristic.

if we have baby albino's and baby anery's and we breed them together we create double hets! that means 100%het anery and 100%het albino. If then finally we breed these double hets together we will have created our own snows (missing black and missing red in one snake). Breeding two double het's together results in:

genotype: 6.25%snow, 6.25%wild, 12.5%anery het-albino, 12.5% albino het-anery, 25% double het, 6.25% albino, 6.25% anery, 12.5% het-albino, 12.5% het-anery.
If you are talking about how the snake looks (phenotype) it is a little easier, you wil get:

6.25% snow, 18.75% anery, 18.75% albino and 56.25% wild colour.

when you use another morph instead of a wild-colour to do this (for example a high-yellow or a flame sandboa, then you are creating new combo-morphs of sandboa's).

note that a double het-trait is not a co-dominant trait, an example of a co-dominant trait is a pastel-ball python, a pastel ball python is the visible het for super-pastel, that means that co-dominant traits do NOT have "possibles".

when combining recessive and co-dominant traits you enter the world of morphs that is virtually unlimited and designer morphs are truely living jewels in the eyes of the herper, in the eyes of others these are "freaks", depends on how you look at them