Het Pied 'Marker'

[CamHanna]

I'm not sure that I completely buy into this idea of disiphering hets and norms by by the belly, but all the same it's kind of neat. My grade 11 biology understanding of genetics allow me to completly grasp how this works; is it like an incomplete co-dominence, if such a thing can exist. Regardless I'm curious to know what the experts think my snakes are. They are all '04s from Tom Talbot.

Het Pied male X Black-Backed female

Female #1
http://www.ssnakess.com/photopost/data/500/5755F1.jpg

Female #2
http://www.ssnakess.com/photopost/data/500/5755F2.jpg

Male #1
http://www.ssnakess.com/photopost/data/500/5755M1.jpg

Male #2
http://www.ssnakess.com/photopost/data/500/5755M2.jpg

Male #1 Dorsal Veiw
His back is black, though I have seen blacker backs.
http://www.ssnakess.com/photopost/data/500/5755BBT.jpg

Please let me know what you think.
Thank You

[Corey Woods]

None of them look like hets to me.

Corey Woods

[RandyRemington]

Here is a pic I took today of 1.2 that I think/hope are hets. On paper they are 25% chance hets and I've yet to prove a single het out so I'm only going by the rumor and the fact that I've seen this passed to almost exactly half of the offspring of the 2 male 50% chance hets I've bred that have the mark. A third 50% het doesn't have the mark but I'm breeding him and his daughters just in case since I've also heard of known hets without the marker.

The pic is too far up on the biggest one (03 female) to show her marks (they tend to be lower down on the sides of the belly) but you can see that most of the belly is white. The mid sized one is an early 04 male from Raul Gomez and an excellent example (degree of the mark seems to vary in ones that I believe have it). The smallest one is only a few days old and a half sister of the biggest one. The way she is laying you can't see it well but she has a really nice long black connecting stripe, more so on the less visible side.

Basically you are looking for a mostly white belly with thick dark solid stripes at the very edge in the last half of the snake. Note that the marks are for the most part out past not only the middle row of big belly scales but even past the outside rows of smaller belly scales also.

Pics of pieds look like the white comes up from the belly and descends back down to the belly in the “normal” pigmented areas so I could rationalize that some hets might start showing from the belly. Also, it might even be that the two black lines in the pigmented areas of the pieds correspond with the two black lines on the edge of the marker ball’s bellies.

There is fairly good evidence of sporadic visible hets in green and granite Burmese pythons (cinnamon and puzzle respectively). Why all hets don't show I don't know but the concept no longer seems implausible to me.

My big remaining question with ball pythons and this het pied marker is if there are identical (i.e. not just similar) marks seen in non hets and worse yet could such marks also be genetic which would confuse the reliability of this sign, especially when trying to pick what statistically should be hundreds of imported het pieds from the tens of thousands of imported babies each year. Even if this mark isn’t unique to het pieds I think it could be useful when dealing with known possible hets.


http://gallery.**************/data/4924PiedHetBellyCompare.jpg

[RandyRemington]

Sorry, I keep forgetting who has banned who's web addresses and apparently the host of the pic I tried to link isn’t allowed here (no doubt a reciprocal action). I need to wait until I'm on another computer to crop it down to a size that I can attach on this site as I can't seem to get paint to reduce the resolution, only to crop the picture.

[RandyRemington]

Hopefully here is the pic. Of course it's now so small you can't see anything.