Can someone explain what all this 50% het hypo and 50% het amber business is with snakes? and where do they keep their saddles?
Im looking at getting one and its like everyone is speaking a different language.
Ta

A 50% het is actually a 50% possible het. People do shorten it and i can see how it would be confusing.

Basically you have a 50/50 chance of your snake being 100% het for the trait or completely normal and not carrying the genes for the trait.

Its one or the other.

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lol, saddles.. on the saddle rack of course!

if you remember that the saddle rack is the spine, you'll have it spot on..

N

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Yeah, but what is a het?

Oh god, I have no idea if your being serious or not (apart from the rack thing) and now I'm just getting more confused

HET is a term used by fanfiction writers to show that heterosexual pairings are within the fiction. This term may also be used in conjunction with slash, a term used to describe a story with homosexual pairings.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HET

I couldnt find much else on the net. Everything talks about heterosexual pairings but surely you cant put gay snakes together... maybe i shoulda been born blonde.

being HET for something, means that you are carrying the genetics for something that you are not showing..

so a Het Hypo snake... (its short for Heterozygous Hypomelanistic) carries the genetic information to reduce the amount of black in the pigment cells.

melanism is black.. so hypomelanism is reduced black whereas amelanism is no black at all.

N

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*grins* at tops...

i am yus, being serious but in a funny way..

a snakes saddles are the blocks of colour in the pattern, to be found along the spine of the snake.. (ie on its back, not its belly!)

you do get gay snake yes, but thats another topic maybe!

HET = HETEROZYGOUS

N

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She is being serious. If the spine is the saddle rack, then the markings that look like saddles( on corns ) are over their spine, if i had photoshop i would show you what i mean.

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Het's are recessive genes, for example if you have say a normal corn snake but one of the parents was an amel, it would be het for amel, meaning that if it was bred with another normal het for amel, they would produce amels.

You can have numerous hets to a single snake, meaning that they can - if bred with the right mate - produce some very interesting clutches. As there are over 150 different colours and patternings of corn snakes, a het is an important way of judging which snakes should be bred with which in order to produce what you want.

Another important factor is that in one single clutch you can have many different colour morphs and patterns depending on the parents. For example, we have a male amel motley which is het for lavender and a female lavender which is het for motley, so when we mate them we should get;

25% lavender motley het amel
25% lavender het amel and het motley
25% motley het opal
25% normal het opal and het motley

Mind you this is never an exact science!!

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