2 Visual albino boas bred to each other ?
Has anyone done this and had successful clutches? Would you breed two albino boas or an albino to a het albino boa?
Has anyone done this and had successful clutches? Would you breed two albino boas or an albino to a het albino boa?
chris b aka minguss
Favorite Answer
Agreed. Albino animals in general tend to have weaker ocular structures.The high amount of inbreeding early with no regard to the cull or eliminate defects did not help (greed was put before proper breeding practice).
Many have had successful breeding with albino x albino. Still even in albino x het and het x het breeding you can still get eye issues. Temps during gestation are extremely important.
You have to make your own mind up. Breeding always includes some risk.
pastavangelist
The first albino boas were produced in captivity in 1992. The original wild-caught albino had to be inbred to his daughters to produce the first captive-bred albinos. Those albinos were sold to many people who did the same thing: they bred the albinos to their own offspring or brother X sister crosses.
With reptiles, occasional inbreeding doesn't usually result in deformed babies, but when it is done repeatedly over several generations, defects show up. One of the defects in albino boas was snakes being born with only one eye or no eyes at all. Since albinos were SO expensive and rare, some of the earliest breeders actually bred those deformed babies, and sold them to other breeders assuring them that "it's probably not genetic". However, a couple snake generations later, this became less acceptable and most honest breeders took the time to expand their gene pool in an effort to eradicate this genetic defect. Hence albino X albino was greatly discouraged.
Outcrossing was encouraged (breeding albinos to completely unrelated normals, to create hets with more genetic diversity). Since then, there has been so much outcrossing, and there are so many thousands of albinos in the pet trade today that the odds of albino X albino crosses producing deformed babies is pretty much equal to that of any other pairing (assuming the albinos are unrelated of course).
I bred an albino to a sunglow for the first time this year and all the babies had perfectly healthy eyes and eat like pigs. I still don't know if I'll do it again, just because the fear is still there that albino should not be bred to albino, but it is becoming more and more common for people to breed the visuals without any defects or problems with the babies. This is the result of years of outcrossing, and the integrity of breeders who refuse to put those eyeless snakes back into the breeding population.