Why Petco Is A Rip-Off- Ball Pythons, Genetics, and You!

So, yeah. Still no job. Petco rejected me. I can nigh-guarantee that I know more about snakes than anybody else they're willing to hire, but since they did not want that, I will instead expose why you're pretty much guaranteed to get ripped off if you buy a snake from them - specifically, a ball python.

I'm going to venture a guess that the majority of ball pythons in Petco's tanks are normal, male ball pythons. They will probably cost anywhere from 50-80 USD. I will now be very blunt and say that you should be paying significantly less for the very same, if not a better, snake.

Why do I say this? Ball pythons are so overbred that they have been called the "dogs of the reptile world." Of all the ball pythons out there, the most useless, genetically, are the normal males. People will thus try to get rid of them as soon as possible, even going so far as selling them in bulk.

A brief refresher on how genetics work: Each parent has two alleles for any given gene. Both mommy and daddy pass on one allele each to the offspring. Each baby carries one allele from each parent, so no two babies will be exactly alike. There are a bunch of different ways to inherit traits (mostly recessive and co-dominant), but we will be focused on the almighty "co-dominant."

Ball python breeders, and snake breeders in general, love the word "co-dominant." It means that you can get something cool out of one breeding. Recessive traits like albinism are more widely-known, but take a grand total of 4-6 years to see the results of if you start with het babies. There is no way to tell whether the babies are het or not; this gets more problematic in future breeding, when you get things like "66% het." Co-dominance is favored because your first clutch might yield a baby that looks almost exactly like one of the parents. If you breed two co-dominants, expect even more craziness, but we won't be doing that. Instead, let's look at everybody's first python breeding: normal x pastel.

Square by NERD. Visit them for more awesome co-dominants!

This is a Punnett square for any normal x codominant ball python trait. For those of you who do not know what a Punnett square is, it is a grid showing potential offspring of two parents. In this case, the normal (probably the mom) is on the vertical axis, the pastel is horizontal, and the potential offspring are in the boxes.

NERD was awesome and used a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on your strain) color enhancer called "pastel" for their example. Pastels are ball pythons with the brightness/contrast messed with to the point where they look anywhere from bright lemon yellow to a slightly cleaner than usual normal. They are the cheapest of the co-dominant morphs. A lot of ball python traits, including the platinum and legendary banana ball, are co-dominant as well; if you're interested in those, simply copy-paste this Punnett with whatever fancy trait you like. Most of the good ones are co-dominant or dominant, and will thus pass their traits on in the first generation. This can lead to some amazing clutches!

That one normal in the back looks...kinda sad.

So, let's assume this clutch contained 4 ball python eggs with an even gender split. Four eggs, 2 male, 2 female. From what I've heard, this would actually be a pretty awesome clutch; four is OK for a first time ball clutch. The better size is 8-10, but let's keep it at 4 for simplicity's sake. Breeders breed so many of them that it seems like there are always more than enough. What we're looking for, here, is that codominant gene and the sex.

We have a 50% chance of getting another pastel ball just breeding a male pastel to a normal female. That one pastel could be male or female. The other members of this clutch could also be male or female. The pastels there can be bred/sold regardless. The normals might not be so lucky.

If one of the pastels is female, wow, we were lucky, right? Let's breed her back to daddy after a few years and see if we can get a super-pastel. Better still, cross her with a spider, pinstripe, mojave - whatever! Co-dominant traits blend excellently with each other and themselves. NERD has some 4-morph combos. I'm sure their prices range into the thousands, and if this sounds appealing to you, bear in mind that you're going to have to start with one trait like the pastel. With a female pastel, you're well on your way!

However.

If we're assuming everything came out with a nice, even split, this leaves us with two magical mystery balls. These, like the pastels, could be either male or female. Remember how co-dominance and simple dominance work: you've either got it or ya don't. In other words, barring any hidden recessive traits, any normal males are useless for breeding.

If both pastels turned out to be male, however, we would lose the dreaded normal male. Then we would wind up with two pastel males and two perfectly good females. Remember, it doesn't matter whether the females are pastel or not; as long as one copy of the pastel gene is passed on, the offspring will still have the pastel trait. Sure, it'd be a bummer to not have a female pastel, but those two females can still be sold for a decent price, and can be used in future breedings. "Breeder-size" females do sell. Normal males do not...unless you're smart.

Snake breeders will get rid of their loser males ASAP.  If you see a tank of normal ball pythons in a pet store, I will bet you money that 90% of that tank, if not all of it, will be composed of dud males. This site is selling them for 25 bucks. Compare that to whatever Petco's selling them for. It's just another reason to buy locally instead of not knowing where you snake's coming from, too.

You might also see beautiful babies like these from Genetic Gems.

In short, unless you are breeding super forms to super forms, every day, all day, you will get a normal male ball python. He will not be a good stud, but he will satisfy the kid down the street who's just itching for a pet snake because you happened to have one (or twenty). Normal males can potentially come out of every breeding, they won't sell very well, and thus, there are a million floating around in miscellaneous pet stores for people who just want a good pet snake.

Now, this is fine if you just want a pet ball python. If, however, you do a little homework and look for reptile conventions, I can guarantee that you will get a better deal on a male ball. These make fine pets and are absolutely ideal for beginners. Also, Petco.com says that they sometimes have co-dominant ball python morphs in stock; I have never seen these, so if you happen to find one for a decent price, snap it up.

P.S. - For those of you who might be interested, I still have baby corn snakes for sale! E-mail the_last_hetaira@yahoo.com

Newsflash: Proteins and Dinosaurs with Funny Names!

So, I know a few people taking biology, organic chemistry, and other such things. It came up that the only reasons a Classics degree like mine was good were 1. it stokes your imagination like crazy and 2. it helps you name things for science. This led to a discussion about how things are named, including the rather bizarre Dracorex hogwartsia.

Dracorex hogwartsia was an herbivorous pachycephalosaur  ("thick-headed" dinosaurs). Like a certain other pachy who will definitely be getting some limelight this Halloween, it was discovered in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota.

Indeed, this dinosaur does look a fair bit like a dragon. The dome found on most pachies is reduced in Dracorex, leading to a very dragonlike skull. Primeval took advantage of the similarity: in one episode, a knight and a "dragon" crossed a time gap; they went so far as to give the Dracorex little fins, furthering the "dragon" idea.

But "hogwartsia?" Really, science? Forgive my use of internet slang, but "LOL."J.K. Rowling was, of course, thrilled to have a dinosaur name inspired by her work. Warning: people who know Latin tend to know science, and Rowling knows helluva lot of Latin.

Dracorex's odd pseudo-Latin is nothing compared to what some scientists have done with proteins, however. No matter how many pop culture references are named in dinosaurs, they cannot compete with how scientists have named genes and proteins lately. There have been a number of proteins named after video games or video game characters, proving just how nerdy scientists really are.

This is fanart. Not mine, just adorable.

Hey, weren't the new Pokemon games released this month? Why haven't I done anything on Pikachurin - the electric protein named after the most iconic Pokemon in existence? (There was also a carcinogenic gene that Nintendo sued over - this is not that gene.)

Pikachurin is a protein that helps the perception of light in mammalian eyes. Thisprotein is also known by the equally funny-sounding name EGFLAM ("EGF-like, fibronectin type-III and laminin G-like domain-containing protein")- we'll stick with Pikachu, thanks. It was named after Pikachu because it moved "lightning fast" and conducted electricity from the eyes to the brain. It's pretty much necessary for the human eye to function. Not a bad thing to name after a colorful electric rodent, although I'm sure the protein being discovered in Osaka, Japan had something to do with it.

Pikachu was not the first video game mascot to get his own protein. That honor goes to the sonic hedgehog protein. It is one of three genes in the "hedgehog" protein channel, with the other two being "desert hedgehog" and "Indian hedgehog." Sonic is the best studied, and with good reason: this protein has an impact on anything from brain development to the growth of digits and limbs. It's responsible for limb regulation in cetaceans, so if you ever see a dolphin with unearthly feet near the base of its tail, blame Sonic for that.

There have been some objections to naming a gene "sonic hedgehog," namely that it removes some of the sobriety that science is so well-known for. Me? I think once you've named a protein channel "hedgehog," you've already opened yourself to jokes. It's just a slippery slope like that.

Newsflash: Fatty Diets Lead to Obese Children.

In literature, there is a trope called "Lamarck Was Right." This trope originates from the idea that Jean-Baptistse Lamarck, a predecessor of Darwin, believed that traits animals acquired during their lifetimes could be passed on to their offspring. The classic example is Lamarck's giraffe: giraffes grew longer and longer necks after stretching to get their food. No Mendelian inheritance involved, nope.

Well, it turns out Lamarck might have been onto something. A new lab study done on mice found that dads who were fed a high-fat diet were more likely to have obese children. While this might seem like a no-brainer, it means that some changes in an animal's lifetime can be passed on to their offspring. More below:

"Male mice who were fed a high-fat diet and became obese were more likely to father offspring who also had higher levels of body fat, a new Ohio University study finds.

The effect was observed primarily in male offspring, despite their consumption of a low-fat diet, scientists reported today at the annual meeting of The Endocrine Society in San Francisco, Calif.
"We've identified a number of traits that may affect metabolism and behavior of offspring dependent on the pre-conception diet of the father," said Felicia Nowak, an associate professor of biomedical sciences in Ohio University's Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine who is lead author on the study.

The researchers point to epigenetics -- the way genes are expressed, as opposed to mutations in DNA that are "hard-wired into the genes" -- as a possible cause of these inherited traits. Because gene expression is impacted by environmental and lifestyle factors, this finding suggests that individuals with obese fathers may be able to proactively address health concerns.

The effect of parents' diet and weight on children has been well-established in humans, Nowak explained, but scientists have been studying the issue in mice to learn more about the biological mechanisms behind the phenomenon. The Ohio University team studied the impact of the high-fat diet only with male mice parents, as most of the previous research had focused on female mice parents.

To conduct the study, the researchers fed male mice a high-fat diet for 13 weeks before mating. (The female mates were fed a matched low-fat diet.) Male and female offspring were fed a standard low-fat diet and studied at 20 days, six weeks and at six and 12 months.

Compared with offspring from control mice (who were fed the low-fat diet), the male offspring of paternal mice with diet-induced obesity had higher body weight at six weeks of age. They also were more obese at the six- and 12-month study markers. In addition, the male offspring of obese fathers had different patterns of body fat composition -- a marker for health and propensity for disease -- than the control mice." Source with more.



On the plus side, these same obese mice babies were actually more active than the average mouse. Quite a twist! So, a question for the readers: was Lamarck really right?

Bio-Art: The Young Family.

Blurring the boundaries between humans and other animals is one of my favorite things in the world. If, however, such a practice became common, it would not be the cute and fuzzy utopia that the furries would probably like. Mixing human and animal nonetheless remains a very popular theme in art and culture, as it has for thousands of years. Only recently, however, has that combination been so close we could almost look in its eyes.




The Young Family, a sculpture by Patricia Piccinini, pushes the Uncanny Valley so hard that it has been featured on those "real or fake" pop-up ads alongside the bully whippet. It features a transgenic creature - or, rather, a family of transgenic creatures. (The artist herself mentions pigs; I for one see more dog in them.) Piccinini claims to have an ambivalent stance regarding technology. The Young Family was made to spark discussion. No time to start that like the present.

First of all, allow me to praise the artist for her choice on adding canine traits (mostly the ears) to her hybrids. Dogs are the creatures that illicit the most sympathy from humans. We already dress dogs up in people clothes and buy them birthday cakes. Had she chosen a pig, frog, or rodent (which are more common model organisms than dogs), the sculpture probably would not have had the same effect. Props.

Regardless of the animal used, the sculpture touches upon a very real issue: Science will create hybrids like the dog-family above. This is not an "if." Science will create fertile human-animal hybrids because it can. We've already engineered bacteria to make insulin and mice to have human immune systems.It is only a matter of time before we make all-out parahumans.

If human-animal hybrids became a reality, organ transplants would become a lot easier. There could be many a medical advance made by harvesting bodily fluids, organs, and so forth from not-quite-human chimeras and hybrids. There is no way science will not do this. People who have relatives with diseases that can only be cured by human tissue replacement will do whatever they can to get that person cured.

Parahumans like The Young Family open a whole new can of worms. Modern culture has placed a special label on humanity. Once the human species starts getting blurred, what will legislation do to the hybrids in labs? A lot of people would say that it depends on if the resulting hybrids are self-aware or not, but no matter where you stand, this will evolve into a slippery slope. If we can give human-dog hybrids human rights, soon, people will insist that mice with human immune systems are human enough for rights.

Oh, by the way,  the U.S. in particular has a bad rap for not giving humans basic rights. Gay marriage comes to mind. This blog alone should be proof that I am not sub-human. Whether I should be on par with a dog-human hybrid or not is up to you.

As the artist herself put it, "These are not simple issues with easy answers: It is one thing to talk about an idea and another to be confronted by the emotional reality of a creature, and yet another to be in need of what that creature might provide." Seriously, discuss below.

Albinism: Different Shades of White.

Holy cats. I hate to sound racist, but...wait...are those black people? That video is from the African country of Tanzania, and those people look light-skinned, but they certainly aren't Caucasian. There are other traits that make them look African. Again, no offense meant.

The people in that video up there are albinos. That is not a racist term. That is the exact same sort of albinism that you see in Burmese pythons, that white gorilla, lab mice, and those white frogs at Wal-Mart. It just so happens to occur in people as well. Even so, not all white people, or animals, can be properly called albinos. Why?

Albinism (derived from Latin albus, -a, -um, "white") makes any given organism a lot lighter than usual. It is commonly thought of as the trait that turns animals white, and, as such, tends to be incorrectly oversimplified into "any white animal." It is found across many, many species, from fish to humans.

Albinism is a simple recessive trait - that is, something can be 'heterozygous for albinism.' That means that the parents of an albino progeny will look completely normal. There is a 25% chance of getting an albino baby (of pretty much any animal) if both parents are heterozygous.

What I said up there can be roughly translated into this little box.

Although 'albinism' is the common name for this mutation, 'amelanism' would be more accurate. The mutation stops the production of melanin (Gr. melanos, black), a common natural pigment. As the name implies, it determines the amount of dark coloration on an animal. Since albinism essentially turns that one pigment off (making the organism white), why not get more to the point? As you will see, not all albinos are plain white...but they all lack black pigment.

For mammals, melanin is the only pigment that they have to work with, so they end up being uniformly white. This is not so for birds, reptiles, amphibians, or fish - an albino Burmese python, for example, also has some yellow pigments to play with after albinism. The same also went for that crazy albino retic from my reticulated python entry - it had orange, peach and purple, of all things! A lot of people do not realize that albinism is just one giant PhotoShop tool that Mother Nature likes to play around with every so often.

Tweaking pigmentation is an awful lot like editing a picture in PhotoShop. For mammals, you can only work in a sort of sepia grayscale, but everything else has at least RGB to tinker with. This is why a lot of mammals share similar patterns and colors. When was the last time you saw a bright purple mammal?

Albino specimens also have vision problems. As with the light skin typical of albinos, the eyes also lack (or have very low) pigment. This makes them appear anywhere from light blue to the infamous pink with red pupils. Having pink eyes is not necessarily a criterion, but it is still a good rule of thumb when trying to pick out albinism from other types of whiteness.

That said, it's time for that pop quiz I promised. Which of the animals below are albinos?

The first two pictures - the white peacock and white tiger cubs - are not albinos. They are different variations of leucistic (from Greek leukos, white). Leucistics have no hard and fast rules or maladies like albinos. Even the heritability of the various leucistic types can vary. There are about a million types of leucism. Unlike normal albinism, leucism gels perfectly well with black.

So, yes, that infamous albino peacock is leucistic. It is hard to see the dark eyes on the peacock, but that it is not albinism is apparent when a white peacock meets and mates a regular blue peacock:



Remember what I said about albinism being a simple recessive trait? Breeding a truly albino peacock to a wild-type peacock should result in all normals that, when bred together, will yield 25% albino offspring. That's not what we're seeing here. Instead, we got a pied peacock due to that particular type of leucism's incomplete dominance. Eye colors aside, albinism doesn't roll that way.

White tigers are not albino, either. I have heard rumors of albino tigers, but the bold black and white specimens seen in Vegas are not albino. If they were truly albino, they would be completely white - the black stripes should be a warning flag. They have a type of leucism with a similar heritability pattern to albinism (i.e. it's simple-recessive). The gene is linked to a trait for severely crossed eyes; all white tigers are at least slightly cross-eyed. There are, supposedly, albino tigers - pure white tigers with no stripes at all - but the evidence for that is sketchy at best.

The squirrel is a real albino. I was not trying anything sneaky with that one.

These last two were trick questions. The blizzard corn snake (Elaphe guttata guttata/Pantherophis guttatus guttatus, depending on your gender today) is part albino, but true albino/amelanistic corn snakes look like something from Woodstock:

To get a truly 'albino' look, an albino corn snake has to be bred with an anerythristic (i.e. "lacking red") individual. (Since there are two types of anerythrism in corns, I may as well add that, should you desire a blizzard corn, the cross is Anery B/Charcoal x amelanistic/albino. Utilizing Anery A instead yields a snow corn, which usually looks far less pure than the blizzard above. Both are often mistakenly called albinos.) The resulting offspring will all be normal-looking hets for both traits. Breed them again for a 1/16 chance of a whiter snake.

The Siamese cat is also a type of albino. In this case, the mutation is incomplete and temperature-sensitive. Like many albino animals, Siamese cats are susceptible to eye issues - mainly, crossed eyes - and tend to prefer daytime hours because they have poor night vision.

There seems to be a lot of misinformation going around. Keep your eyes peeled for mistakes, and somebody please correct me if I made any!