Quote Originally Posted by twgrosmick View Post
I believe the melanistic will overpower the pied

I agree with Shannon. I have doubts about that. Pied genes really just turn off a group of cells' ability to function. Even if a snake was melanistic, as long as the pied gene could still do this, you would still have white patches or at the very least you would have "mocha" (like the snow eastern) colored patches but who knows. We really have no idea how the genes would interact.

You know, it occurred to me that this pied gene could be lethal to homozygotes (it's very common) and that the original pied was actually a het. That would make all these "het pieds" actually normals. Everyone has been assuming that the pied phenotype is homozygous but the odds of that are actually pretty slim.