Some New Hypo BRB Photos...and a little bit of History

[wetceal]

I just wanted to share this with my RedTailBoa.net friends as well. Here are some new pictures of one of our Hypo Brazilian Rainbow Boas. The animal in these pictures is our adult proven breeder male. He bred three females this season. Of the three, one has given birth prematurely and unfortunately only two of the babies survived (all were hypo since the female was a hypo as well). We still have two females who are gravid, one is another hypo and the other is a het hypo. Both have litters due soon.

Now for a little bit of history on these guys for anyone who is curious...

All this was back in 1995 or so. Originally, Dick Ross had a pair of wild caught adults that produced babies. One of our employees at the time picked out a pair of the babies from the litter Ross' WC adults produced. The babies were raised up and bred to each other. In return, they produced a litter of 20 babies. Of the 20 babies, 18 were normal looking while 2 were somewhat different looking.

The employee decided to sell all the babies as well as the adults so they were all sold to the store (EBV). We ended up selling all the normal looking babies in the litter and keeping the two strange looking babies to raise up as well as the original parents. Now these two different looking babies just happened to be a pair. While they looked different than the normal babies, they were nothing close to what is recognized as our hypos now. However, as they grew, they became lighter and lighter, finally reaching a very yellow coloration. The adult male in these pictures is the original odd looking baby male.

It turns out that the pair that our employee originally purchased from Dick Ross are het for Hypo. We sold all the normal babies for about $100 to $150 or whatever the going rate was at the time for pet BRBs. What this means is that there may be a bunch of BRBs out there that are now adults and possibly het for our strain of Hypo.

So that is basically the story on these guys. Now our babies start out looking very different than normal BRBs but it doesn't end there. They get better and better as they grow because their coloration continues to lighten up until they reach adult size. The male in the photos is about 4 1/2 feet long. He's a little skinny at this time since he has been breeding all season and still wants to breed but he should put the weight back on in no time once breeding season passes. The two remaining gravid females we have are nice and fat now so they should hopefully give us some super looking babies again this year!

Thanks,
Celia

Here are the pictures...



Head Shots






Some close-up shots


Zooming in...




[addsig]

	Heterozygous Heterozygous - the animal carries the gene for a genetic trait but does not outwardly demonstrate the trait. Example: A boa that is het for albino looks normal but carries the albino gene. When it is bred to another het for albino boa or an albino boa, a percentage of the offspring will be albino.

	Hypomelanistic Hypomelanistic - a genetic reduction in the dark pigment Melanin.

[LdyDrgn]

Will the price on these be dropping at all?
[addsig]

[wetceal]

LdyDrgn - I talked to the owners and they are probably going to price the new baby Hypos at less but I do not know how much less than the sub-adults we currently have. We got some new het for Hypo BRB babies this year which are priced at $1,500 each as opposed to $2,000 each for the sub-adults. I'm hoping that the new Hypo BRB babies will be priced at around $5,000 or less but this is just my guess so don't quote me on it. We'll just have to wait and see.

Celia
[addsig]

	Heterozygous Heterozygous - the animal carries the gene for a genetic trait but does not outwardly demonstrate the trait. Example: A boa that is het for albino looks normal but carries the albino gene. When it is bred to another het for albino boa or an albino boa, a percentage of the offspring will be albino.

	Hypomelanistic Hypomelanistic - a genetic reduction in the dark pigment Melanin.