Hey Rich, hypo lavendar, opinion??

[ecreipeoj]

A possible explanation

Usually, personal emails are strictly confidential between myself and the other party, but I do not think that Rich will mind in this case.

“Best I can speculate that I have had at least one new Hypo gene that has spontaneously cropped up into my stock.”
Rich Z.

Rich and I were discussing Hypo Lavenders, the confusion with them, and the likely hood that some Hypo Lavenders may not be compatible. Considering how our conversation was going at the time, when I read the above sentence I thought to myself, “Yeah, right!” No explanation was offered, no pictures, no nothing.

It is funny how things will come to mind sometimes. KAT and I were discussing hypos of course. We started off with Lavas and ended up giving our spiel for our name suggestions for Hypo Lav. She likes “Amethyst” and I like “Cotton Candy”. She sent me a picture of a sunset in her area and said that the adults remind her of a sunset at times. I sent her a picture of the “Sunset” Lav and said that this is what a sunset looks like around here everyday. Kat ask me if it was a Lav or Lava Lav and it just hit me that these guys could be mistaken for a Hypo Lav very easily and may in fact be a new type of hypo.

I have evidence in my Lavender Corn Snake colony that there may in fact be a hypo type gene contained within the lavender group that is unrelated to other hypos. My in house name for them for CAV, is “Lavender Hypo” (Homo Lav and ? or something new) instead of Hypo Lavender. (Homo hypo/lav). I called the first one I recognized “Lavender Hypo” The second one “What the hell is this” and “ Sunset” Lavender and the other one is also called a “Sunset” Lavender. I have also produced a “St. Lavender Hypo”.

All Lavenders like amels are distantly related as far as we know. Rich Z‘s and my Lavenders are distantly related. Most of my Lavenders came from Rainwater through Ted Frey, which is linked to Rich, is how the story goes I believe.

I would love to hear Rich’s explanation about how he suspects that a new hypo gene popped up in his lavender colony. He may highly suspect this, but doesn’t know exactly how he knows it. He has the Regular Hypo gene heavily bred into his lavender colony. Could he tell the difference between my “Sunset” Lavender Hypo and a Hypo Lavender?

I do not have the Regular hypo or any other type of known hypo in this group of my Lavender Corn Snakes, so I can isolate it. These “Sunset” type Lav hypos, all come from my St. Lavender Project group which is isolated from my other Lavenders. I used an Amel St. and a Rainwater Lavender to start the project. So far from this project, I have hatched out right at 300 viable offspring from them. No anerys of any kind, thank god, and no Hypo Lavenders. I have recognized four of these “Lav Hypo” type snakes. I have produced more St. Lav and St. Opals than these guys.

My initial theory was that I some how I isolated out the gene that lightens St. Corns. My new theory is that the new Hypo that Rich suspects popped up in his lavenders has also popped up in my lavenders, but since I do not have the Regular Hypo in the mix, I am able to recognize it for what it may be. I suspect that they are a new type of hypo from the lavender group that Rich has also suspected he has in his lavender colony.

These “Sunset” Lavenders are not Hypo Lavenders, but could they be mistaken for one?

 

[ecreipeoj]

"Lavender Hypo"?

2002 hatchling "Lav Hypo" comparison photo between a sibling lav.

 

[ecreipeoj]

Same "Lav Hypo"

as above

 

[ecreipeoj]

"Sunset" Lav

This snake was born brown and turned into this.

 

[ecreipeoj]

"Sunset" Lav

This Lavender was from a second clutch. I thought it was a lavender and then it began to change.

 

[ecreipeoj]

"St. Lav hypo"?

This snake appeared to be just a St. Lav, but after I sold it it changed into this. When I had it, it seemed to get lighter every day.

Owned by: Mike Panichi

 

[Darin Chappell]

I have a 1.1 pair of anery bloods that are actually from Walter Scott's lines (though I did not get them directly from him), and they also show the sex linked coloration difference. When I get home tonight, I may try to post some pics, as they both just shed.

Also, the non-motley ghosts that I have seen that show the exceptional pink coloration are males. Motley tends to exaggerate the pink in both sexes, but even there, I believe males are more pink than females.

I believe there are sexually dimorphic colorations to be found in corns.

 

[Darin Chappell]

1.1 '03 anery a bloodreds

Here's the female:

 

[Darin Chappell]

While she has no pink on her at all, take a look at the male:

 

[Darin Chappell]

Now, these animals are only a few months old, and the differenciation between them is already profound. The male is VERY much more colored up than she is with pink and a growing pronounced yellow along the bottom of his sides.

After having spoke with several individuals who have anery a bloods (including Don Soderberg, Chad Fuchs, and Jim Stepflug--the last of which is the one from whom I got these), it is a common theme to have males of this morph show the pink and/or yellow, while the females are just black and silver.

I know that not all lines of this morph have males with this coloration, but I would be interested to see if anyone has a female of any line that IS showing these colors.

 

[Rich Z]

“Best I can speculate that I have had at least one new Hypo gene that has spontaneously cropped up into my stock.”
Rich Z.

Rich and I were discussing Hypo Lavenders, the confusion with them, and the likely hood that some Hypo Lavenders may not be compatible. Considering how our conversation was going at the time, when I read the above sentence I thought to myself, “Yeah, right!” No explanation was offered, no pictures, no nothing.

Yep, that's right Joe. Read my sentence again. It says "speculate". That means "gut feeling". "suspicion", "maybe", or "could be".

I have a lot more questions than answers, so there is no way in hell I am going to pretend I know what is going on and make a fool out of myself by going out on a limb and stating anything with any sort of authority or conviction. Photos? Of what? Yeah, I have lots of what should be Hypomelanistic Lavenders and I also have lots of Lavenders that really shouldn't be Hypomelanstic Lavenders that are certainly light enough to be so. What would photos prove?

As am example, I started the Hypo Lavender project in 1993 by breeding a Hypomelanistic corn to a Lavender corn. In 1995 I bred several pairs of the resulting offspring together and got NONE that appeared to be the two genes combined. Well, double hets can do that, but I sure was disappointed. But I did hold back a bunch of female Hypos possible het for Lavender as well as Lavenders possible het for Hypo. In 1996 I got three animals that hatched out that finally looked like what I expected Hypo Lavenders to appear. Lavenders that were noticeably lighter colored than the typical Lavenders. However, all three were males.

In subsequent years, I never really got a large number of Hypo Lavenders, even though I bred those three males back to their parent females as well as the hypo and Lavender hets I had held back. Even so, ALL of the ones I was getting that looked like decent Hypo Lavenders were males. At this late date, I don't remember whether I was just discounting anything that didn't appear as bright as those lighter standouts as being just regular Lavenders. But again, I did hold back some females that appeared at least slightly lighter than the run of the mill Lavenders.

One thing that may be important to note here is that I did not note which animals were what I considered as Hypo Lavenders when they hatched out. It generally was about a year later when I finally would start putting labels on them. For the first few years, I always keep everything in a new project anyway, so it just didn't matter to me. My suspicion is that there were a lot more animals that were lighter colored as babies that just turned darker as they matured. But in any event, a couple of years ago I finally got smart and began labelling the babies right when they hatched out. The lighter ones were noted as Hypo Lavenders, and the darker ones were marked as regular Lavenders.

Another important note: I tend to breed multiple males to each of my females. With the females in this entire project, I would breed them with all three of my original Hypo Lavender males. This just seemed to increase the ratio of fertile eggs substantially. But the odd thing is that a year or two ago, I bred one of the Hypo Lavender males, and ONLY that male to a Hypo female het for Lavender. And I got all normal colored animals as well as regular Lavenders. My assumption was that the male was NOT actually a Hypo Lavender, but was instead just an exceptionally bright regular Lavender. Of course, I labeled all of the Lavenders from that clutch as being het for Hypo and kept some back for breeders. Now in hindsight, I suspect that the female Hypo het Lavender may not have been the same Hypo gene and that male actually was a Hypo Lavender, just not the same TYPE of Hypo. But that was before I knew how deep the water was I was wading in.

Anyway, over time it became apparent that not only were the males generally much lighter colored than the females, there were also exceptional males that seemed much brighter than the average. As for the females, they were ALWAYS just so-so looking and never really came even close to what even the average male Hypo Lavenders looked like.

Anyway, this was getting ridiculous. Why in the world would the females be just so much darker than the males? Quite frankly, I just blamed it on rotten luck. Since I REALLY wanted nice female Hypo Lavenders so badly, that of course doomed me to not get them. It got to the point that I didn't even have to sex the Hypo Lavenders. It was by this time a 100 percent certainty that they could be accurately sexed just by their coloration.

Now it gets even wierder. THIS year (2003) I decided to take a step backwards to try to get a base level on these Hypo Lavenders. So I decided to ONLY breed Hypos het for Lavender together and not my usual breedings using those Hypo Lavender males (remember, I already thought I had one male that wasn't really a Hypo Lavender, so maybe there were one or more that were fooling me as well). I figured this way, ANYTHING that hatched out Lavender HAD to be a Hypo Lavender. Right? Simple solution to the problem and I would have animals that I had NO DOUBT whatsoever were Hypo Lavenders to work with.

Well, you probably guessed it. When those clutches hatched out, out of say 12 to 15 clutches (sorry, I don't have my notes handy), easily 75 percent of them threw me a curve ball. In those clutches I got the expected Hypos and a few Hypo Lavenders, but I also got a large proportion of NORMAL corns as well as REGULAR Lavenders. Now that just shouldn't be. The other clutches DID give me what I expected (ALL Hypos and Hypo Lavenders), and the Hypo Lavenders that hatched out were all stunning. And miracle upon miracle, most of them are females!!

So anyway, it's getting late, and this sort of nonsense has been run through my mind more times than you all can ever imagine. So I am not even going to attempt to try to sort it all out. I suspect that somewhere, sometime, some other Hypo gene got thrown into the mix, but that doesn't explain the apparent sex link I had seen over the years tying hypo to only the males. And if there were such a link, then why did that link FAIL this past year with those Hypo het Lavender breedings that gave me the predictable results I was expecting?

And this is just looking at the Hypo Lavenders. Believe me, there is a LOT more to it involving other cultivars that makes this all seem like some huge cosmic joke. But heck, it doesn't even bother me any more. It was either not let it bother me, or go insane, so I chose the former..... I'm going to just hatch out baby corn snakes from the eggs and giggle when this crazy stuff happens again this year. Hmm, maybe I only THINK I chose the former....

So in a nutshell, I have been working on the Hypo Lavender project now for 10 years and although I am getting some results, I really don't know what the results mean. I guess what I had hoped for in all this and what I had expected from the very beginning is something I will call "Jukebox Genetics". What I had wanted and hoped for was that I could put in my quarter, hit button "B1" and get the tune I was supposed to played for my enjoyment. However, it looks like things just don't work that way in real life.

Anyway, sorry, but I am not going to go back and proofread. Getting lazy in my old age.

Have fun.....

 

[ecreipeoj]

Sex linked pink?

There are some genes in the animal kingdom that are sex linked in other animals than birds or lizards for example. In most bird and lizard species there is a very obvious difference in the color between males and females, with some exceptions of course.

I do not think that you can place a clutch of corn snake hatchlings in a bucket and pick out the sexes by their color at this time, but there may be some things that may be sex linked. Pink coloration for example is a suspect. I am very open minded to the possibility that some genetic type of coloration may be identified as sex linked to male corns.

The above “Lav Hypos” seem to be some sort of hypo type corn from their appearance. The Lav color has and opaque, obsidian type look, but they are just suspected to be genetically different. I have been able to pick out these four corns from a considerable amount of lav corns, as similar types that are not like a regular lav. What sex do you think these four “Lav Hypos” are? They are all males. My best Opals are all males. The nicest Snow Corn that I have ever seen is my Snow Okeetee and it is a male. I have an Anery Corn that has a pink wash on its entire body and it is a male. I have 2.4 “Coral” Snows, I believe that is what they are being called now, they are Homo Snow/hypo. They are extremely pink and you can not tell one from the other. What genetics are involved that causes the pink coloration in corns? Is there more than one type of pink in corns? If so, is one on these types of pink coloration sex linked to male corns? There may be a time when we have isolated a certain type of pink coloration that is sex linked to male corns and can pick the sexes out from a bucket if they are of a pure strain, but what if a second type of pink is added?.

I would have to say, that in my collection, some male corns exhibit more pink coloration than the females, but there are exceptions.

Photo attached: Male Snow Okeetee Corn Snake, "Okeekee Phase"

 

[SODERBERGD]

pseudo sexual dimorphism. . .

Let's start with the usual disclaimer. I AM NOT STATING THAT THESE ARE FACTS. JUST OBSERVATIONS AND EXPERIENCES. PLEASE, DRAW NO CONCLUSIONS FROM MY COMMENTS.

I've had this conversation with many folks over the years. With some exceptions and I can only speak from my personal experiences with MY lines of hypos and ghosts, I can identify the gender of many of my hypos and almost all of my ghosts by looking at their colors.

I'm not the only one to have noticed that many of the hypo. corns out there show different colors for males and females. That is, in my lines of hypos, the males tend to be lighter or will have more "buff" shades to them. It's most obvious in the ghosts. In many of my different ghost lines, the males will have more of the tan/flesh/buff/peach tones and with very few exceptions, the females will be more silver and gray, lacking those "peachy" tones. I'd estimate 95% efficacy in this detection method with my ghosts. I can identify the gender of MY lines of ghost corns simply by looking at their colors. I'm being conservative on that 95% efficacy estimation.

Like Joe, my best coral snows are males. Everytime I have bred two ghosts together that were het. for amelanistic, the snows are always "coral", but the males have the deepest coral colors.

With some exceptions, most of my pastel (ghost) motley males have those peach/pink/flesh/tan tones while most females lack that, showing mostly grays and silvers. This is one reason I took exception to some folks saying the pastel motleys are the ones with the pink and the ones without pink are ghost motleys. Nonsense. This means my males are pastel motleys and my females are ghost motleys. Pastel motley has been the accepted name for ghost motleys for over 15 years now. If we try to tag only the pink ones with that name, then most of my females will have a different morph name than my males. There are exceptions, but for the most part my females lack that pink coloration OR it is greatly reduced in them compared to their male counterparts.

The common denominator in most of these combination morphs is hypo.. I don't know if any of the other hypo. genes out there will behave this way, but the observations above represent the majority of my snakes with the hypo. gene. Since it's not as easy to 'sight sex' my hypos as it is the ghosts and snows, maybe it's about the combination of anerythrism and MY hypomelanism. Shrug?

If anyone else out there has noticed any of this or other dimorphic tendancies, let us know.

 

[Rich Z]

Just to throw another wrinkle into this sex linked discussion, pretty much without exception, my FEMALE Fluorescent orange animals are much prettier and bolder colored than the males are.

Of course, as is usually the case, once I state something like that, the following year I get MANY examples to disprove the theory.

Seems to me that when I was working with Pueblan Milk Snakes, one sex was always more brightly colored than the other, but darned if I can remember which one....

 

[SODERBERGD]

Man, I know whatcha mean . . .

Probably for every 10 female reverse Okeetees I could hold back for best looks, I typically find only one male worthy of keeping.

I'm sure this thread will generate some stories along these lines. You and I would never make these statements if the results weren't the result of a huge study group. How many times have all 15 eggs in a clutch been male? Those things happen, but like you, the observations I shared are the result of hatching many hundreds of ghosts, etc..