A little more about these...
Look through the VSMherps website I came across a type of corn called a snowflake black albino. I've never heard of them or even seen them. According the information listed it's not a hybrid and sells for $2500 (I really hope that was a typo)
Has anyone heard of them/ bread them/ ect, or is this morph just some other crazy type of snake?
Here's a pic:
Just a couple of comments: We elected not to use the Calico name as that name has already been applied to a somewhat different looking snake in the past. The old "Calico" had larger groupings of white, more like blotches of it (as in a calico cat), where these are more speckeled. The old Calicos had a rather serious deficiency as well, in which they were normal colored at birth and then around sexual maturity, they developed blistered areas that literally dissolved. After this cleared up, white blotches were present. Almost as if they were scar tissue. Anyway, between that headache and the requirement of growing them for a year or more to see if they really were calicos, they've sort of vanished from collections as far as I know. To keep things distinct, we selected the name snowflake for this new snake instead - sort of descriptive of the little white speckles.
The original Snowflake snake (an Anery, het for Amel) was found in a pet store, and only had a couple of small white specks that just seemed to be in a places where they shouldn't have been. They said it had been the class room pet of a biology class. I bought it for grins and two sheds later, presto, I suddenly owned a speckly white snake. Honestly, it has been one sickly POS that took years to get back down to normal body weight (man, it was fat, really fat, actually grossly fat like a ball python) and is now in good health and it has bred a few times. One of the offspring is the semi-famous female paradox snow illustrated in the 2008 Cornsnake Morph Guide. We've now bred this paradox female back to the male snowflake the last three years running, hoping for more paradox, or snowflakes. None appeared to have any visible traits of either type, so we more or less considered it case closed. We retained two of them, both snows, almost by accident, thinking of maybe breeding one of them back to the paradox female just in case. To be honest they were stuck in a rack and more or less forgotten for a year. Imagine my surprise when I pulled them out and one has what appears to be snowflake speckles (hard to see white on a snow...and I give up trying to photograph it well). But they appear to be intensifying in both numbers and clarity with growth. So it appears that this trait may in fact be heritable as a recessive trait, but like the old calicos requires the year or so of growth before showing coloration. Luckily, there is no sign of the blistering associated with the old style calico trait. Whether it's the same trait or not will probably never be answered, but with different look and lack of blisters, I don't think so.
So where the project is at now: We've just hatched another clutch of snow and anery babies from them and will retain all 18 for at least a year. If a number of these (we anticipate half) show the trait, we'll be certain it's a recessive trait and will offer them up starting at $2500 each to first-round investors. Relative chicken feed for a new mutation of this importance, especially one assumed to be easily combined with all known colors and patterns and with each snake being sold already a year old and visibly showing the trait. German and Japanese investors are sure to snap them up immediately. Please don't start emailing me and asking to be put on a list, it's a long long way off, and after growing them for a year I might keep them all anyway, who knows....
So, there's the story and if you want more (there really isn't anymore to tell) email me, as I very rarely visit forums and only came here after being prompted by a friend.
