Questioning the strawberry gene

I don't think comparing a strawberry to a red-factor amel, especially one that's from a bloodred parent, is a good comparison. Not to go off in another direction, but I also think bloodreds (NOT just diffused) are homozygous for redcoat, another seemingly dominant gene, as well. Not to mention the potential problems using one from ultra lines...

Some strawberries/red-factors may also be hypo-a's in addition to being het or hom for redcoat as well. This would give us several different phenotypes, which is what we are seeing.

Initially, what led me wonder about all this was the following observations (both in my own animals and those I've seen in other's pics online and in live animals at shows):

#1. Strawberry anerys that looked NOTHING like the pink salmon anerys. I know selective breeding is often attributed, but there should at least be some variation in a clutch (not accounting for sexual dimorphism). I've seen several unrealted clutches from different breeders where all the resulting "strawberry" anerys just look like typical ghost. My assumption is that strawberry stock was simply a misidentified Hypo-A mutant.

#2. F1's that are pink from outcrossed pink animals. Take a NICE salmon snow/ghost and breed it to run-of-the mill anery and see if you don't get 50% pink anerys. I challenge anyone to try this.

And most importantly, #3. Anerys with a pink background, not ghosts, but anerys with black saddles. IF strawberry is a form of hypomelanism, than the saddles would be a tan/brown color like other ghost and phantoms.

Again I could be COMPLETELY wrong about all this, but sometimes I do think it is wise to go back and re-test our theories and to question what we think we know.

I guess I should have posted the rf normal hatchling first but even in that pic you can see a big difference in the two. There are different forms of redcoat/redfactor and I am not convinced that redcoat is dominant. The cherry line of redfactor I am working with seems to be dominant for I am seeing offspring in F1. As for the whole "ultra" thing. I would say that in this day and time it would be hard to find "pure" corns in anyones collection.
All diffused being homo redcoat? I don't see this either. I have them of both redfactor and non redfactor here from different lines.
Here is a pic of my redfactor male Ochre, is he homo or het diffused?
As far as the salmon snow x anery, if the anery is het hypo and the salmon did have strawberry in the gene makeup you would get some pink animals from the hypo/strawberry combo.

The "red" stuff in my collection is apparently able to be inherited from just one parent - Certain offspring from certain parents have turned out to be either really red hypos or if normals, get a red wash to their belly and look much different from "normal-normals" There is one female that I suspected to be "red factor" that had a clutch with red hypos and a hypo cinder that is really red. The same male I paired with her did not produce the same results with other females. Then my lavender female ended up having a couple of hypo babies that are really red as well. leading me to suspect that I have 2 females that have a dominant red factor they are passing down. I never really Wanted to work with red factor or sought out animals with the trait (I kind of dislike pink ghosts) but it's in my collection just the same.
I totally buy that there is both - a dominant gene (that might be what made those old school bloodreds so deep red as well as putting a layer of red onto other morphs it touches) , and a completely different, recessive, hypo compatible gene that makes them red. hypo is 4 letter word, lol

JimGERcream said:

great thread. I also have my doubts with the whole strawberry thing. meanwhile there are tons of breeders who started projects with JMGs corals and all label these babys as het strawberrys (JMG coral ghost = strawberry anery, does anyone ever proved that??), :shrugs:

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BINGO.
There is no strawberry gene in the JMG line CG/SS.
Of course breeding JMG line to strawberry gene produces strawberry stuff.
I suspect someone presented an assumption as a fact and then others procreated the myth.

snakepunk said:

#2. F1's that are pink from outcrossed pink animals. Take a NICE salmon snow/ghost and breed it to run-of-the mill anery and see if you don't get 50% pink anerys. I challenge anyone to try this.

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I get around 35% which color up well after 3-15 months.

crotalis40741 said:

As for the whole "ultra" thing. I would say that in this day and time it would be hard to find "pure" corns in anyones collection.

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I totally agree. But you can usually tell the difference between an Ultramel Anery and a ghost.

crotalis40741 said:

All diffused being homo redcoat? I don't see this either. I have them of both redfactor and non redfactor here from different lines.

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I wasn't stating that diffused were homo redcoat, but bloodreds are. I make a distinction between the two and am of the conviction that "true bloods" are a combination of diffused, redcoat, masque (another dominant trait), and possibly one or two other traits.

crotalis40741 said:

Here is a pic of my redfactor male Ochre, is he homo or het diffused?

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He is really cool, but he LOOKS more like a redcoat sunglow to me. He has more of a distinct head pattern than what I am used to seeing on fires (amel bloodreds). Do you have a belly shot of him?

crotalis40741 said:

As far as the salmon snow x anery, if the anery is het hypo. and the salmon did have strawberry in the gene makeup you would get some pink animals from the hypo/strawberry combo.

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Yes, but you could always use an anery that isn't het Hypo.

At any rate it's a fun discussion. Needless to say, I've got plenty of projects to keep me busy the next several years, but I'm cool with that.

snakepunk said:

I totally agree. But you can usually tell the difference between an Ultramel Anery and a ghost.


I wasn't stating that diffused were homo redcoat, but bloodreds are. I make a distinction between the two and am of the conviction that "true bloods" are a combination of diffused, redcoat, masque (another dominant trait), and possibly one or two other traits.


He is really cool, but he LOOKS more like a redcoat sunglow to me. He has more of a distinct head pattern than what I am used to seeing on fires (amel bloodreds). Do you have a belly shot of him?


Yes, but you could always use an anery that isn't het Hypo.

At any rate it's a fun discussion. Needless to say, I've got plenty of projects to keep me busy the next several years, but I'm cool with that.

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Yes it is a fun talk, here is the best belly shot I have of him.

another wrench to toss in the gears.
A few of these ("byproduct") popped up in the F2 gen from
Dark red oldschool bloodred diffused X JMG coral ghost 66% het amel.
Photo taken in indirect outdoor natural lighting. No flash. In the last couple of sheds, some of these have developed a few white splotches on their dorsal scales. Some kind of hypo-somethings, no name for them yet.

Great looking snake Dave

crotalis40741 said:

Great looking snake Dave

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You've got some purdy sweet fishing lures yourself there Mister Bob.

I know folks have said that the different genes of redcoat/redfactor don't play well together but I would still like to put Ochre over a cayene fire and see what happens. Next season his daughter should be big enough to breed back to him to get the gene I have here in f2.
Thank you Dave

dave partington said:

Are you referring to a strawberry amel, strawberry anery, or a strawberry snow here?
I have never seen a classic with pink ground color.
Do you have a pic?

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Not of my own but crotalis just posted one that looks similair to mine as well. I could take a picture but its with a camera phone

So far, I've tried to avoid the whole strawberry gene vs. red factor/red coat issue as all it is going to do is confuse everything, myself included. I bred my JMG coral ghost male with a high pink TS snow female and did get about a 50:50 ratio of pink offspring with the snow males showing more color than the anerys, male and female. I'm not sure if the TS snow female has any hypo A in her lineage or not, but being a TS, anything is possible. I will say, there were no ghost offspring, the anerys were black at hatching and showed no indication of having any form of hypo in them, and the pink color is strictly in the ground and more easy to see in person than in a photo. My male snow keeper is just chock full of pink.

JMG Coral Ghost father
TS Snow mother
Anery male offspring (after first shed)
Anery female offspring (")
Anery female offspring (")

Anery female offspring (after first shed)
Anery female offspring (")
Snow male offspring (")
Snow male offspring (")

dave partington said:

BINGO.
There is no strawberry gene in the JMG line CG/SS.
Of course breeding JMG line to strawberry gene produces strawberry stuff.
I suspect someone presented an assumption as a fact and then others procreated the myth.

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Did Jeff test this? Although he is credited the most for these pink snakes, and perhaps he did improve the line, he got his animals from Jim Stelpflug. Jim is the originator of not only the salmons, but strawberry itself.

My keeper anery female, and as usual, her pink is difficult to capture with my camera, and my keeper snow male, who is actually much pinker in person, but again, the color is difficult to capture with my camera and the flash. I'll try for better photos outside one of these days.

And 3 hypo siblings (het Sunkissed motley) that some have told me could have strawberry in het or homo form, but I really have no way of proving it one way or the other. It may have been red factor/red coat. I just can't remember, and honestly, don't care. I just like them!

snakepunk said:

Did Jeff test this? Although he is credited the most for these pink snakes, and perhaps he did improve the line, he got his animals from Jim Stelpflug. Jim is the originator of not only the salmons, but strawberry itself.

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True. Originator of strawberry, not the strawberry gene. A linebred trait,
further selective breedings including a few other traits & genes lead to the coral ghost line, and over generations as the genes became more interlaced came the high color coral ghosts

Susan, Ione (TS snow) was possibly het hypo; both her F1 parents were positively het. Their father was a "pastel" ghost het amel, per Sean at VMS. Out of 7 kids you would have thought if she was we'd have seen ghosts last year, but that's not terribly uncommon when dealing with possible hets, as we all know Murphy plays his games...

dave partington said:

True. Originator of strawberry, not the strawberry gene. A linebred trait,
further selective breedings including a few other traits & genes lead to the coral ghost line, and over generations as the genes became more interlaced came the high color coral ghosts

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So Dave, are you saying that there are two forms of strawberry, with one being polygentic? If so, what's the difference phenotypically?

snakepunk said:

So Dave, are you saying that there are two forms of strawberry, with one being polygentic? If so, what's the difference phenotypically?

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I'm not stating there are.
I'm stating that there appear to be.
I don't know the full genetic history of the individual snakes which were used to verify the 'strawberry gene'.
I do know that (from conversations with Jeff sr. at JMG) that the "strawberry" which was used back in the early formulation (f5 back or so) of the CG/SS -
-was a linebred trait which was developed by selective breeding and removal of non-strawberry-red stock from the original project to produce the first non-gene-strawberry-colored snakes.

This next portion is NOT inclusive of Bloodred/Diffused ,
I think a lot of persons have already shown that breeding a red snake to another red snake produces red snakes. Then any non-red snakes are discarded from the project, and F2 yields more red snakes. To put it another way, if you take a hundred different looking people of all races, eye color, hair color, foot shapes, etc, (assuming they do not have racial issues) and place them on an isolated island, and come back several generations later, they'll collectively look more similar then they did when dropped off there. After some more generations, they'll all look even more alike. Sure, there will still be the occasional recessive gene which pops up here and there, but the same is true for wild snakes. This is true of all locality types of snakes; they stay within a geographical region and so they begin to all look alike. For example, if one goes to the region where gray base Miami corns are found, they are all gray base-colored, but the farther away you go from that place, the fewer wild corns will have that gray base color. What I am describing here is genetic, but does not necessarily mean any one specific individual gene is responsible for their visual color.


So you take a w/c gray base Miami and breed it to an orange base-colored w/c central florida corn, and half the babies come out with gray base, the other half come out with orange base color in the F1. This does not prove that gray base or orange base are co-dominant. It simply shows you that half of the parents of the offspring were either orange or gray base. I suspect, it appears to me, this assertation that strawberry goes co-dominant in the F1 is not necessarily what is always actually going on, though it has been said a lot on forums and repeated a lot elsewhere. Then in the F2, sib to sib will produce the typical punnet square result, or F1 X either parent will produce the punnet-predictable results. But until someone actually takes the time to prove or disprove any of this, it's never going to be really known. In the meanwhile we'll be mixing up a lot of genes and traits even further, so much of the cs stock in existence is so far from whatever it originally was, etc.

The last couple paragraphs in this post are possibly related to the concept of this red stuff being a trait.

After talking with several individuals here and "elsewhere", a few things are becoming apparent:

1. Without a microscope, one cannot identify strawberrys.

2. Well-known breeders, even those known for their strawberrys, have mistakenly identified and sold animals as strawberrys that are not.

3. Different breeders have different definitions/qualifications for what is and what isn't "strawberry".

4. A lot of people are assuming (which may or may not be the case) that ALL those crazy pink coral/salmon ghost and snows are strawberry.

And finally,
5. If enough people perpetuate something as fact, even if it is not, it gets accepted as the truth, despite evidence to the contrary.