First feeding for the last 2 regular clutches

Last Sunday, I fed all this year's babies. For the 4th and 5th clutches, this was their first time to be offered food. Here are the results:

In the 4th clutch (from D'vorah), 7 ate and 5 did not, which isn't so good. However, in the 5th clutch (from Y'hudit), 18 ate and only 1 did not, which is very good.

This last clutch is also one of the most interesting this year. We bred Yeled, our male amber (hypomelanistic caramel) corn snake, to Y'hudit, a female anerythristic corn snake. And we got very lucky! It turns out that Y'hudit is heterozygous (a recessive gene carrier) for hypomelanism, something that was not known before. Getting even one hypomelanistic baby would be enough to prove this. Once one knows this, one would expect about half the clutch to be hypomelanistic (reduced melanin, which makes brighter colors). However, we got 14 hypos and only 5 normals! Another interesting fact: the 5 normals all just happen to be males in this case. However, in another stroke of luck, only 4 of the hypos are male, whereas the other 10 are female. This also is good for future breeding plans with these babies (more females means a higher number of eggs in the project). When breeding a pair of these hypos (3 years from now), one would expect to get about 3/16 ambers, 3/16 ghosts (hypomelanistic anerythristics), and 9/16 hypos. The other 1/16 will be both amber and ghost, but will probably look either like ambers or ghosts (I not sure whether anerythrism overrides caramel or the other way around.).

Part of the deal we made when we got Y'hudit, however, is that we will give her previous owner (another friend of Golan's) part of the clutch. Exactly how many we're not sure, but we will certainly be able to keep some for ourselves.