The Higher They Rise, the Harder They Fall..

WARNING: There will be dead animals in this blog. It will not be pretty and it will be somewhat unpleasant if you are not comfortable with death/exposed flesh/blood/gooey stuff/grossness.
  

Please turn away now if you are unable to stomach matters as listed above.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The last two eggs were dead. They were sweating while the others were hatching, but I had slight hope that they may magically hatch out and all would be good.

So when the last Axanthic popped out, I cut the dead eggs.

And of course, I found two more Axanthic Clowns.

The first one was actually reasonably well formed, and what I believe to be a Pastel Axanthic Clown.
This can't really be confirmed, as being in the egg and decomposing somewhat, the colors of animals do tend to change.

But the head color is the indicator that leads me to believe it the most. 

Moving on, I opened up the other egg, and knew that this guy wouldn't have survived anyway.

It was completely underdeveloped. I'm not sure when it stopped, but it looks pretty bad.

The spinal cord and back never fused together, and the head was misshapen.

Had somehow this animal managed to survive to pip, I would have still had to put it down. 

And as you can see, it was still attached very much to the yolk and didn't seal up on the belly either. 

Now let's go back to analysis of the other one. 

The color is pretty established on the malformed animal, so I put them next to each other to compare colors. Remember, they died around the same time.

Do you see what I'm seeing?

Do you see the obvious color difference?

I don't think I'm super crazy, but I tend to err on the side of conservative before announcing official things. Especially considering this would have been a world first, as I understand it.

So... whether it is or not, it didn't make it.

But I will be trying again, and this time with the Pastel Clown for sure to confirm my suspicions.

What do you think?

 But on a positive note, three beautiful girls survived.

Something to be grateful for. 

Have a great day, my friends. 

And remember, life is fleeting. Don't take anything for granted.

Your friendly life reminder from your saddened Ball Python Breeder Wonginator.

It has arrived! TSK Axanthic Clown

So it looks like it's a girl.

But it is also fully out of the egg, and looks VERY similar to the previous TSK Axanthic Clowns that were produced in 2008 by Bryce Honstead. Here is the blog with the photos from way back then.

Here the two sisters (as briefly checked by me, so therefore I get to edit the sex on a future date if necessary) in a nice pretty photo together.

There is another Axanthic pipping right now, with two more eggs to go. The female that produced these girls has popped out a significant amount of Axanthics. Last year the clutch was all Axanthics as well!

I am really very pleased with the way this critter turned out.

As I have mentioned before, I like patternless (alien-head-less) Clowns, and this one fits the bill for sure! 

The one back in 2008 also was very similar to this one, with no pattern on the sides.

I tried to get the real color on camera, and the photo above does the best job at it. They do tend to brown out as they age, and with the morph being as bright and golden toned overall, they dull out to a nice taupe, as shown here on this blog from 2010.

That female in the blog is still here in California, and I hope to track down some updated photos for you to view.

I am very excited to play with this project, as I have been working towards it for a significant amount of time. I just got there a little faster than expected. YAY!

Hopefully I have another one in the egg, or something else popping out that can explain what is going on with the males of the breeding.

Fingers crossed, and check back in tomorrow!

Have a great day, my friends.

Clutch #2, pipping out

So I have a mystery, and I need it solved.

This clutch that is hatching out is from my TSK Axanthic possible het Clown female to my Clown male and my Pastel Clown male.

I had intended only to prove out whether or not this female was Het Clown, and so far over the last three years have had no success. 

This year, however, I had eight eggs to see what the odds were.

So of course, now they are pipping, and the first animal popping out is an Axanthic.


WHAT???????????????

There is no good reason this animal should be hatching from this clutch, considering the fact that the female was bred exclusively to Clown and Pastel Clown males this season.

The slight possibility of retained sperm is there, so I sigh and wait. This little girl popped out on Sunday.



Last night, however, I look in the incubator, and I see this.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAT??????????

So yeah. I hit on the TSK Axanthic Clown. 

I should be stoked, right?

Problem is, I have no idea how I did it!!!

So I'm thinking that this is a possible scenario.

Way back in the olden days, I didn't have clown stuff.. I had Het Clown stuff. I got a Het Clown male from Bryce Honstead of Reptile Image, who produced the first TSK Axanthic Clowns. (Click to read/see the original babies from 2008. I WAS THERE FOR THAT! )

I knew the male was 100% het Clown, and that was it.

Fast forward a year, and I breed the Het to a Pastel and keep all the Het females. I have 0.1 possible Het Clown and 0.2 Pastel possible Het Clowns.

Grow them up, and breed them to a Clown...

I hatched out 1.1 Pastel Clowns from one of the Pastels, which I then held back.

All the while, the TSK Axanthic possible het Clown Female, also from Bryce, is growing and breeding and not showing any signs of anything Clown like.

THIS YEAR, I bred the Clown male (from a completely different source, and pictured first), and the Pastel Clown male that I produced from my clutches wayyyyy back in the day. (Did I mention WAAAAYYYY back in the day?)

So... my thought is that my Pastel Clown male is also het TSK Axanthic. And that my Het Clown from WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY back in the day was also het TSK Axanthic.

And I lucked out super style with possible hets.

Cause there is no other explanation for this. At all. (Unless you can think of one...)

So... yeah.

There are three more eggs to hatch, and two or three that went bad. (I'm crossing my fingers on one of them).

We shall see when everyone comes out what the heck is going on.. at least more of the puzzle.

Yeesh.

Have a great day, my friends.