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Breeding

Galataya16

Galataya16

New member
OK, I'm new to all of this but researching and learning quickly (Thanks to all of you!) but I have a question...

I see pairs being sold as male and female and they are clutchmates. In snake world is it OK to breed siblings? If so, are there no genetic defects from doing so? Isn't the intention of purchasing a pair to breed or in cases like these do they purchase with the intention of breeding with other snakes?

Thank you all so much for your kindness and help, you're amazing.
 
This is a controversial subject with much debate. Personally, I will never inbreed. There are enough animals (corns at least) that you can maintain strong lineage and bloodlines and not inbreed.
 
It is generally much more acceptable to closely line breed and inbreed reptiles, they seem to tolerate inbreeding much better than most mammals. That said, there are some potential genetic issues that can come from inbreeding and it's best if possible to outcross as much as possible. However, since most corn morph genes are recessive, all of the founder animals for these morphs were almost always inbred in the beginning, at least. And some of the other morphs are line bred traits and so those animals are going to be fairly interrelated to at least some extent as well.
 
I think I read that up to three(?) generations can breed siblings safely.
I try to outcross as much as possible, but sometimes line breeding is what creates the desired outcome.

For example, next years breeding plans, I will pair my 2013 Sunglow Tessera with his half sister. His dam, was an SMR Coral Snow. I have a 2011 Coral Snow daughter of hers, that will be paired with the Sunglow Tessera.

I will do it some times. with specific goals in mind, but most of my projects are outcrossed.
 
Well, I believe that even in mammals there is a LOT more inbreeding and line breeding then people care to admit. How else would animals like a silver labrador retriever be created. They are cross bred with a Weimaraner but there is probably more line and inbreeding then people actually realize. I was just curious because with mammals it so frowned upon but seemed like an openly done thing with the research and stuff I've been doing. The genetics and stuff really interest me :) Thank you all for your inputs and answers!! :)
 
And those sound like some awesome projects!! I would really love to see more coral tessera snows!! I did see a post where it looked like Steve Roylance bred one but I haven't seen anymore then that. Would absolutely love that!! :)
 
Galataya16 said:
Well, I believe that even in mammals there is a LOT more inbreeding and line breeding then people care to admit. How else would animals like a silver labrador retriever be created. They are cross bred with a Weimaraner but there is probably more line and inbreeding then people actually realize. I was just curious because with mammals it so frowned upon but seemed like an openly done thing with the research and stuff I've been doing. The genetics and stuff really interest me :) Thank you all for your inputs and answers!! :)
Click to expand...

One of my best friends (who also breeds snakes) has bred ACD's, Malinois, and ferrets, over the past 20-ish years. There is some line breeding to try and breed out some undesired traits, such as Cryptorchidism (I use that as an example, because that was a specific trait she was trying to breed out of a certain line of ferrets.
Good breeders put the health of the animal first, and use line breeding to better the line, and they do it responsibly.

Mammals are more affected by it than reptiles are, but reptiles are not immune to problems resulting from too much line/in breeding.
 
I'm really glad your friend is a good, responsible breeder. I love to hear when people are concerned about the animals themselves. Seems hard to find anymore.

It is so frowned upon with other animals it made me curious about snakes because I see so many pairs sold that are clutch mates. I know there are breeders that probably have other snakes to breed with also.
 
I'm not opposed to buying siblings to pair together, but I try to find out how far back sibling pairings have gone.

I have sought out various MBK's, from different sources, with the intent of pairing unrelated animals, specifically because they are the type that are often purchased as a 1.1, and paired together, then 1.1 babies sold, and so forth.
 
What would be the purpose of breeding clutch mates? I could see the half sibling pairing due to different characteristics/traits and I understand that even clutch mates have different characteristics, but within the exact same line wouldn't you end up with fairly existing characteristics that are already in the lineage?
 
I think the appeal to buying/breeding siblings is that if you're looking for a specific combo of genes, you might have a hard time finding another seller who has them available, whereas in one clutch, most of the babies carry the same genes so it's really convenient to pick up a pair of clutchmates that have genes that complement each other.
 
I personally refuse to do any inbreeding as it's not necessary for any of the genes I work with. I don't mind having to wait longer or having to find different snakes with a similar gene set, as long as it's the responsible thing to do :)
 
Plus if you can buy both snakes from the same breeder, you can save on shipping ...

Genetically, inbreeding is the fastest way to prove out a new recessive gene. Say for example, someone finds a striped corn in the wild (a lot of the first genes in reptiles were actually found by finding one in the wild that was expressing the gene) and you wish to know if it's just an aberrant pattern or if it's inheritable and if so, how inheritance works. Depending on the gender of the animal, in a lot of ways, finding a male is best for this, if male you breed it to a number of other females, which will give you a large pool of animals het for the gene, if it is recessive, that are half siblings. If no visual animals like the Dam or Sire you were testing appear in the F1, that first clutch(es), then you know it isn't a dominant but might be a recessive.

If the animal was a male, you can grow up the half siblings and then pair them together, because you know that if it is recessive, all of that male's offspring will have received one copy of the stripe gene from the Sire and be 100% het for it. In a het to het pairing, in nature if not in math, it is possible to still not get any visuals even in a large clutch, so to prove inheritance on this stripe gene, you would also probably want to breed a daughter back to the homo father, that would give you better odds of getting a visual in the clutch if it is recessive. Plus you could have held back one or more males from the F1 and a number of the females from the different Dams of the F1 and pair that male(s) to a number of his half sisters to get a good chance of proving that gene out. That would also give you about as good a mix of outcross as you can get in trying to prove a recessive, even though that is still closely inbred.

If that first striped animal is a female, then you will only get one or maybe two clutches from her in a year and you can try pairing multiple males with her to get a bit more genetic mix in those clutches but that may or may not work and can be difficult to tell half sibs in one clutch apart. So a female visual is going to be a bigger initial bottleneck than a male. With her though, the fastest way to prove it out is to pair her with a son, males generally take a lot less time to mature enough to breed and one may be ready in as little as a year, which can save you a year or even two years of time on proving this gene out, so that is one advantage to finding a female with a potential new gene.

It is possible in a case like this to avoid inbreeding in the first degree by holding back all or nearly all of the produced offspring and outcrossing your possibly het animals to other unrelated snakes and in about 3 or 4 generations, you could start doing some line breeding in the second or third degree, third degree is legal in humans in most cases and considered the least harmful of any type of inbreeding, but that would require 4 to 5 times as much time, 20 to 30 times as much space and resources to hold back all or nearly all of that many generations of animals and since the particular, hoped for possible recessive gene will have been spread out so much in doing that, a large percent of the animals you held back will not actually have that recessive and recovering it would also take a lot of different breedings. This would vastly reduce the amount of inbreeding in these animals but with only one founder visual animal and a gene that is recessive, you will still have to do at least a little bit. Which no one is going to put forth all of that effort for an unproven recessive! Would suck to waste 15 years of your life if in the end you proved it out as an aberrant pattern not heritable in Mendelian genetics.
So you can see why close inbreeding in at least the F2 is pretty much mandatory by even the most conscientious of breeders to prove out the inheritance of newly found genes. It's just not practical to do it any other way without knowing how the inheritance works, if it's even inheritable or not. Most breeders working with a new gene do quite a bit of first degree inbreeding in the first 3 generations and then the good ones work really hard to outcross their lines again as much as possible without losing the gene(s) they are working with.
 
Thank you very much for all that info Tavia!! I really appreciate that response and totally understand and makes sense as to why it is done. I am really thinking that I'd like to breed even just one clutch down the road a few years just for the experience of it. So would love to understand genetics and breeding of corns. I don't know that I would ever be one to get into it that far but maybe because all of this is so interesting and I enjoy learning about it.
 
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