INTRO

I’d like to begin where this started and give special thanks out to John Michels from California, U.S.A. one of this hobbies GOOD guys and overall decent chap.

I first got to know John some years ago from a spot of good luck in truth, and I’ve always found him easy to work with and also 100% honest.

Although better known in recent years for his Awesome Drymarchon projects, he was also an accomplished Pituophis breeder.

http://www.blackpearlreptiles.com/

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Probably THE most exciting annectens development in recent years has to be the Patternless and Albino patternless.

The first ever patternless was a male named ‘Sancho’ found in the field by John Michels from California and this was the only one to be found, despite valid attempts to locate another example within the same locale.

Sancho’s first breeding’s were made with two albino females and the resulting offspring were all ‘normal’ possible het for the as yet unproven patternless trait.

I was lucky enough to obtain one of those snakes, a male gifted to me by John himself. My initial thoughts being…well even if this guy is not het for the new morph he’s certainly 50% wild bloodline, which of course meant new genetic vigour into my collection.

Of course this thought pattern was changed when John was successful in reproducing the patternless visually and from multiple clutches he hatched not only the first cb patternless, but also two albino patternless. Both world firsts!

pics courtesy of John Michels

I was lucky enough to be offered the first refusal on not only one of the albino patternless females, but also the pick of any siblings/litter mates…… I still to this day feel indebted to John and the loyalty he afforded me is not forgotten.

From the hatchlings on offer I took along with another het male, a striper male and the oddest looking ‘normal’ female I nicknamed New W/T ….translation New Wild Type, more on her later.

I also took an odd looking albino female I dub ‘Michels Special’ (top right, second pic). There was something quite T+ about this girl but then again not quite like any other I’d seen before. As she matured she became very interesting in terms of colouration being a soft orange with an odd greenish patterning.

Fast forward to last season and I found myself in the lucky position of hatching the first generation/s of patternless genetics outside the U.S.

These breeding’s not only yielded some very nice new looking albinos and also my own first albino patternless, BUT with an added twist 🙂

The special albino female I refer to above gave me the twist; she produced the albino patternless that is essentially also T+, Non albino eyes and a dark tongue.

After referring back to John he confirmed this was in fact a world first!……………It’s only taken me 25+ years of keeping but…. a world first is a World First!!

This season I’m replicating the same pairing along with an albino patternless x het patternless pairing, I’m not expecting the same ridiculously lucky results, but nonetheless I do hope to hatch out some normal patternless and maybe another one or two of the wonderful special T+ albinos.

I’m aiming to get snow genes into the patternless line and this season I’m pairing up a male snow with the New W/T female. She was a little too small for my liking last season so I made no attempt to breed from her. Her pheno look is something quite different to all the other ‘normal’ examples in my collection in spite of their varied genetic make up/s.

At this point I feel it best to illustrate the descriptive with pics……

…….and to act as a comparison here is a young ‘normal’ het patternless

I’m hoping she will produce viable eggs soon and allow me to begin another exciting new annectens project.