GBWhite
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Personally, and I'm not having a go at anyone here, but I don't see any difference between breeding the morelia spilota group from different areas to line breeding animals. Isn't the intention of both to produce an animal that is aesthetically pleasing to the eye as a commercial product? It seems to me that the principal reason for line breeding is to produce an animal that has greater sales value and as such easy to dispose of. For example, you don't see many (if at all any) breeders of "pure" lines putting "Diamonds" on the market that display a noticeable lack of yellow pigment nor pale forms of "Bredli" or dull coloured "Jungles" despite the fact that these colour variations are quite common in the wild. It's still selective breeding either way. Line breeding and selective breeding are not confined to pythons either, it's common practice right across the board, from dragons, monitors, skinks, turtles to vens. From what I see, not many of the albino carpets available these days look like the original one collected in Darwin.
From how it looks to me, it's only people that are really into herps that seek out "pure" forms and even then they prefer an animal which is aesthetically pleasing to one that lacks visual appearance. The average Joe doesn't seem to mind what they look like because they just want to own a snake.
I'm pretty confident that other than Bredli & Imbricata I could actively seek out specific morphological variations of "Coastals" from the mid to far north coast of NSW and over a couple of generations produce snakes with the colouring and patterning consistent with those from way outside the area. In fact, when "Jungles" started to appear on the scene in the 1990's, I held a scientific license to collect any species of reptile in NSW. So, just to prove a point that I believed the eastern and northern spilota group were all the same snake, I deliberately line bred selected wild caught "coastals' from my immediate area and in 3 seasons (as I hypothesised but within a shorter period than I expected) produced a clutch where over half displayed markings and colours identical to the black and yellow banded "jungles" found in far north Qld which is a couple of thousand kilometres north of my place. I ended up giving them to a friend who went on to produce more and passed them on to one of his friends who ended up selling them as "jungle" pythons.
From how it looks to me, it's only people that are really into herps that seek out "pure" forms and even then they prefer an animal which is aesthetically pleasing to one that lacks visual appearance. The average Joe doesn't seem to mind what they look like because they just want to own a snake.
I'm pretty confident that other than Bredli & Imbricata I could actively seek out specific morphological variations of "Coastals" from the mid to far north coast of NSW and over a couple of generations produce snakes with the colouring and patterning consistent with those from way outside the area. In fact, when "Jungles" started to appear on the scene in the 1990's, I held a scientific license to collect any species of reptile in NSW. So, just to prove a point that I believed the eastern and northern spilota group were all the same snake, I deliberately line bred selected wild caught "coastals' from my immediate area and in 3 seasons (as I hypothesised but within a shorter period than I expected) produced a clutch where over half displayed markings and colours identical to the black and yellow banded "jungles" found in far north Qld which is a couple of thousand kilometres north of my place. I ended up giving them to a friend who went on to produce more and passed them on to one of his friends who ended up selling them as "jungle" pythons.
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