alltailnolegs: (top photo of Watermelon & Jake belongs to The Barn) Alright, I’m gonna

alltailnolegs:(top photo of Watermelon & Jake belongs to The Barn)Alright, I’m gonna try to cover what I can here because clearly there’s a little confusion with how chondro colors work.To get it out of the way, with GTPs there are no easy morphs like there are for ball pythons (save albino). What we do have are a bunch of extremely varying localities that are slowly, sometimes frustratingly, bred for color. To put this in other terms, instead of simply putting a lesser to a mojave and hoping to make white snakes because math, you’re breeding two slightly bluer than normal animals and hoping to get interesting blue babies, which you’ll then breed to other blues and hopefully someday the hobby will have something super cool. Jake, Vayu’s sire, is one of those unicorn super blue animals and a culmination of blue genetics (top right).This writeup is trusting everyone knows that green tree pythons start red or yellow, go through a change at around a year of age, then mature into their permanent adult colors (now you know).So let’s glance over colors and the fun things they do ( @morelia-viridis​ and @mcsprinkles​, feel free to chime in). GreenWe have to go over green first. Green is the most prolific color in the species, hence the name, and covers a wide range of colors from deep forest greens to yellowy mustards. I don’t really need to go over how you get green babies, because you slap any two snakes together and that’s probably what you’re gonna end up with.YellowYou can get yellow snakes in a number of ways, but it primarily boils down to either making your green tones look yellow (mustards), or trying to reduce how much green is on the animal (High Yellow).If you’re looking to make HY animals, there’s a few localities you can look at. Biaks are the typical go-to animal for yellow, and their genes seem to do interesting/unexpected things when paired with designer blood. For example, Watermelon (pictured top left, Vayu’s dam) is a biak animal that seems to throw good black and blues when paired with blue bloodlines.The downside to biaks is that while normally green tree pythons go through a major color change at around a year of age, biaks will very slowly change over the course of their lifespan and rarely keep that dramatic patchy green/yellow look. Many of them will ‘green out‘ with time, and this trait will sometimes cause designer babies to take their sweet time changing into their final colors. This is where family trees begin to matter, as some individuals have more ‘yellow staying power‘ than others.Padaido are a bit of a sidenote locality to biaks. They are rarely imported, generally come from one small area, and look similar to biaks but have cleaner edges, deep greens and hold onto their yellow exceptionally well.Kofiau is another hard to come by locality. While strikingingly gorgeous yellow, the color tends to be tricky to reproduce in captivity and many of the yellow animals wash green with age.WhiteThere are white kofiaus out there, but they’re weird and we’re all confused about those. Anyway. White as we’re covering it is in regards to spinal white, which is iconic in merauke and aru localities. The merauke solid stripe of white is, unfortunately, hard to reproduce at all in captivity, and there have been several environment experiments trying to find something in the external habitat that causes the stripe.Aru has similarly elusive results, with many aru x aru pairings ending up with low white animals. A few breeders have struck white gold though, along with the theory that arus are typically only compatible with the island they originated from (there are something like a couple hundred tiny aru islands where this locality hails from).White comes in with the first change, and doesn’t fade with age.BlackBlack doesn’t have any ‘easy go to‘ localities, and is often the subject of debate. To break it down into generalized categories, there is mite phase, highland/tipped phase, and melanistic.Often when you have a lot of crazy localities mixing together on a baby, and you’re aiming for the darkest baby out of the clutch, you’ll get something that comes out with a lot of black. Here, again, is where family tree information comes in. If a bloodline has a lot of highland blood in it (highland covers a range of localities; arfak, lereh, etc), the black is not likely to stick around for adulthood and will end in a ‘tipped’ look or vanish entirely. This peppering of black on the edges of scales is mostly uniform along the body.What qualifies as ‘mite phase‘ specifically is the cause for a lot of debate on the forums, but the general consensus is that these are animals with scattered completely black scales that have stayed with adulthood, or in some cases even showed up after the main change.Regardless, extremes are simply named melanistic.BlueAh, blue. The drugs of green tree pythons. There’s plenty of localities that naturally have some blue. Sorong is a pretty good classic. But blue bloodlines really try to create animals that are solidly blue.Unfortunately, blue is really erratic and squirrelly to reproduce. A lot of individuals in the line have a blue wash of varying degrees across the body (and some siblings will simply be green). Reverse to biaks, after the initial change this wash will intensify over the first five years of the snake’s life until they reach full maturity.Rarely in blue bloodline clutches there will be super blue phase animals. Instead of the wash, they have the initial change and will go directly from red to a blue frost of color (Jake, top right, is a super blue example). For both phases, blue bloodline animals often change and gain black scales (Jake). Most of the time the scales will fade out into adulthood, often leaving blue scales.SO IN CONCLUSION. Green tree pythons are weird, and if you throw them together intelligently enough you’ll eventually get bizarre stuff, and who the hell knows what Vayu will look like in the end. -- source link

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