great plains rat x snow corn

[rynwilliams]

What sort of colour snake would you get is you crossed a great plains rat snake with a snow corn? also how do striped corns come about?

[Colonel SB]

You would get a normal lookin cross between the two, the snow phase is a double het trait. Where both melanine and Xanthophrs are missing, so If you crossed a ghost and a albino...then crossed thier babies you would get snow corns. Stripe is a simple single recesive trait.

[vanderkm]

The gene for striped in corns is recessive but it is a bit weird because it is one version of the recessive and motley pattern is the other version of the same gene - so you can get either pure striped, pure motley or partial striped and motley. The motley pattern has the saddles connected along the length of the back to varying degrees and both stripes and motleys have white bellies with no checker pattern. As I understand it, your best chance of producing good stripes is with well striped parents, but there are still chances that a cornsnake that appears striped may actually be a motley/stripe combination - so looks can be deceiving.

The cross between a great plains ratsnake (normal color grey, not amelanistic GPRat - which is different from the amelanistic gene in corns) and a snow corn would give a snake resembling a normal patterned corn with reduction in the corn characteristics (washed out color, reduced black borders, greyer rather than red and oranges). This is an intergrade cross, between members of two sub-species, with fertile offspring, so it is important that these not be represented as true cornsnakes. The appearance of the babies would vary in terms of grey and reddish brown expressed, but all would carry the genes for amelanism (lack of black) and anerythristic A (one version of lack of red pigment) from the snowcorn parent.

When these offspring are bred together you have a chance of producing creamsicles, which would have to have both genes for amelanistic instead of normal. In this next generation cross, you could likely expect to see the influence of the amount of red that was behind your original cornsnake parent (even if it was not expressed in the snow) and it would be unlikely to get the bright yellow-orange that has been developed in creamsicles that have been selectively bred for this color.

You would also have some chance in the second generation, of getting what have been called snowcreams - these appear like snow corns but arise from breedings with creamsicle or GPRat genes. Again, it is important to make sure the GPRat background of these is made clear to anyone who buys them because they can be mistaken for snow corns and could mess up someone's pure corn breeding program.

Hope that helps,

mary v.