Paint Jobs

As reptiles are becoming more popular to have as pets, breeders are finding ways to make them look more colourful and appealing, so they are creating designer morphs. In this blog I am going to try and explain how morphs work and a little about reptile genetics in a way that is easy to understand.

First of all, let's start by looking at the gene types. I'll start with recessive, co-dominant and dominant genes. 

Recessive

The recessive gene will only be visible if paired with another recessive gene snake. So breeding an albino royal to another albino will create more albinos but the gene will be visible. If you bred an albino to a normal, the albino gene will not be as visible but will be referred to as het albino.

Albino Royal

Co-Dom

This gene type is more dominant than the recessive gene. Pairing two co-dominant animals together may produce a 'super' form, meaning that, two pastel morph royals will produce a super pastel royal. If you breed a pastel to a normal, half will be normal and half pastel.

Pastel Royal

Dom

The dominant gene is what it says on the tin. If you pair 2 dominant animals together, you will duplicate the morph. For example, the spider morph gene is dominant so breeding a spider to a spider will produce mainly spiders but with some others as well, depending on what genes they carry. Breeding a spider to normal will produce half normal and half spider royal.

Spider Royal

This is just a rough guide to the three different terms. A great site to check out is World of Ball Pythons and also check out their Genetics Wizard to see more information. In this post I have only mentioned royal python morphs, but the same principles apply to other snakes such as reticulated pythons and corn snakes.

Reticulated Python

Corn Snake