help with breeding

[ricorice]

hi all well i got a baby anary motly (soz if its spelt wrong my spelling is crap) and when she gets bigger i wanna start breeding them but what would b the best morph to bread her 2 to get some nice 1ns

[hooter]

Lol,

You need to read up on cornsnake genetics. You cant just breed a motley corn snake to an okeetee for example and expect to create a new morph. You will end up with a bunch of normals.

I'm sure someone will get into detail or post some valid information on this subject for you but in short its all about what your snake is het for and what you breed it to...

[ricorice]

no i dont mean to make a new morph i mean say i breed her with a snow would i b abel to expect a snow (i love them :D)

[rwg]

In brief: Most neat traits are recessive. That basically means both parents must have the gene in order to pass it on to the offspring because each parent gives one gene to make up a gene pair, and both genes have to be for the trait for a recessive trait to show up in the offspring. If a snake has one gene for a recessive trait, and the other normal, the snake is said to be het for that trait...in other words, is a carrier. A snake that is "het" for a trait will basically donate the recessive gene to about half of it's offspring, and the normal gene to the other half.

The classic human example is eye color. Blue is recessive. That means you need both genes to be for the blue trait to get blue eyes. If both your parents have a blue eyed gene, either by having blue eyes, or by carrying a blue eyed gene paired with the domninant brown gene, then there is a chance the kids will have blue eyes.

With snakes, it's more complicated because different traits interact with each other, but you have to consider them independantly to figure out the offspring. For example, snow is (if I remember correctly), anerythristic (no erythrin...no red), and amelansitic (no melanin...no black). These are both independant. Your snake is anerythristic (no red). Assuming your snake is not het for amel, all babies would get the anery gene from both parents (since both of them have anery/anery gene pairs), and would hence be anery. All babies would get the amel gene from the father, but would get the normal gene from your snake, so they would all be het for amel, but would not be amel, and hence not be snow. All babies would also carry the motley gene (be het for motley), but none would be motely unless the father was also het for it.

Now, if you bred the offspring to each other, since all of them are het for all the traits, there's a statistical chance that some of the babies would be snow, some would be anery, some would be anery-motley, and some would be snow-motleys (whatever that would look like).

Hope this helps more than it hurts.

rg