Litter #7 PANDA PIED MAKERS!!!

[aSnakeLovinBabe]

Lol..... What is this, the ball python forum!?! Congrats Jeff, those should be interesting! Definitely not my cup of tea, but it'll be neat to sit back and watch how that plays out. The piebald gene proved out?

[aSnakeLovinBabe]

Fingers crossed for this project, its def. a cool one!

I second the idea that melanistic will overpower the pied appearance, but nonetheless, they would make powerhouse breeders!

Should be quite exciting in two or three years time! Best of luck

I don't think it will! I believe that since true pied trait wipes pigment and pattern from certain areas, that pied will dictate what areas of the snake will have color and pattern. I believe that because that is how true piebald has always work in other types of animals.... But I suppose we will just have to wait and see!

[ConcinusMan]

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.