Monday, November 10, 2008

Striped Snow Kenyan Sand Boa

Part of my snake fascination is their genetics. We are in the golden age of snake breeding now and so many new color variations and genes are available- especially in ball pythons and corn snakes.

I want to make a shout out to Vincent at Natural Selection Reptiles. He is an "Evolutionary Biologist" at Yale University and he has a marvelous little section in his website about the genetics of snakes.
Through e-mails, he has helped me a lot with understanding the genetics of Kenyan Sand Boas. I found out that it is possible to have a Striped Snow- or in other words, a Kenyan that is striped (50% Rufescens phase- a co-dominant gene) and both albino and anerythristic. That is so cool to me. I even made up this little punnet square:
I found out from Vincent that i did it wrong because I treated the striped gene as if it was recessive. In reality, I believe 1/3 of the snakes would be normal pattern, 1/3 striped, and 1/3 granite.

Anyway, if anyone actually has a striped snow kenyan sand boa, I'd love to see it.

1 comment:

dave, catie, and baby b. said...

what you didn't tell people is that this was all drawn on a 3x3 bar napkin....i love you davey...and i love that you're such a snake nerd.