New to Boas (and the Forum) - Meet Aunty Rachel

[dannybgoode]

@dross - she is 66% poss het t albino. However I have no idea what that means! I'm afraid I'm not really up on morphs etc - it was just love at first sight. Which bits are the hets?

She was actually bred in house by one of the store owners so I can get full details of lineage etc.

I'll get some more pictures today. I'm limiting the handling of her whilst she settles. She seems remarkably calm though. No hissing or puffing when I do get her out and she's happy to be on full display during the day and get active at night.

[bigsnakegirl785]

Originally Posted by dannybgoode

@dross - she is 66% poss het t albino. However I have no idea what that means! I'm afraid I'm not really up on morphs etc - it was just love at first sight. Which bits are the hets?

She was actually bred in house by one of the store owners so I can get full details of lineage etc.

I'll get some more pictures today. I'm limiting the handling of her whilst she settles. She seems remarkably calm though. No hissing or puffing when I do get her out and she's happy to be on full display during the day and get active at night.

66% poss het albino means it has a chance of carrying the albino gene. Since albino is recessive, animals that carry one gene of albinism are called hets, or heterozygous. You need two genes to make a visual. And a poss het means that both parents were hets.

You can't tell when a snake is het albino without breeding them, so all you can do is say poss het unless the parents leave no doubt of the offspring being visual or 100% hets.

Originally Posted by dross9615

Sorry I got ahead of myself I didn't mean to make it sound like I was suggesting it was a blood. I just thought the reds were pretty out there in this one.

No worries, I was actually responding to dannybgoode anyways, with their question about whether or not it was possible to see what locality of Central American their boa was.

[Nightflight99]

Originally Posted by dannybgoode

@dross - she is 66% poss het t albino. However I have no idea what that means! I'm afraid I'm not really up on morphs etc - it was just love at first sight. Which bits are the hets?

bigsnakegirl785 already gave a good explanation of what it means, so I'll just add a few comments:

Anytime you hear someone mentioning specific percentages followed by the term "het," they're always referring to statistical probabilities of that animal carrying a particular genetic trait (i.e., being heterozygous for that trait). As long as that same genetic trait was known in the parent animals that produced this snake, those probabilities can be calculated. However, since they are based on statistics, which can be highly inaccurate at small sample sizes, they are merely loose predictions.

Statistically speaking, if you were to mate your specimen to an albino male, it would either be expected to produce 50% normally-colored and 50% albino specimens (if yours is in fact heterozygous for albinism) or 100% normally-colored snakes (if yours is not heterozygous). In genetics, this is called a test cross. In herpetoculture, it is mostly a fun experiment.

If all of this sounds too confusing and academic, then don't worry about it and just enjoy the animal.

Originally Posted by dannybgoode

Nature knows how to do beauty IMO better than humans do.

I love this quote and wholeheartedly agree!