Well, my 2018 breeding didn't turn out the way I had I hoped but that may be a blessing in disguise.
My original 2006 het male & het female resulted in a bunch of non-morph babies which has me a bit perplexed. I expected 1/4 but my new metric of "broken eye stripe" is now the defining trait I'm looking for so maybe there's more I need to learn.
My 2010 and 2013 visual morph pairs didn't lay any eggs despite observed multiple copulations and being all proven breeders.
So only my 2012 visual morphs actually produced anything worth talking about but, boy howdy, did they produce. 100% morphs! 90% eating right out of the egg. No spinal kinks or weird crap.
Just look at that killer!
So the next thing to sort out is how to tell which babies will turn into which colors. To get an idea about that let's look at last years babies 1 year on.
So there are two morph babies in this pic (one is buried under the bunch on the right).
and look at how red they are now!
this is another group with loads of morphs but......
one year on the pattern is cool but the colors don't impress me.
so.. how do I tell which colors will be which?
well.....I don't know this morph is highly variable.
And that leads to this little factoid.
In nature cadmium ore is bluish white but the dyes made from it are yellow, orange, red, and green. It was widely used in the renaissance but it turns out that the yellow/orange changes over time which colors how we view 400 year old paintings and frescoes. I was staring at some ores in a museum display in San Francisco when it hit me that this perfectly explains my morph. So....cadmium Texas ratsnake.
Now, these are all 2017 babies but if you look back through the other posts it's obvious that I've got a pretty serious variable morph on my hands. Oh well. Nothing is ever as cut & dried as we want it to be. Until next time.
Oh wait! The title of this entry was "2018 babies" you should at least get one pic of a 2018 baby so here you go:
