Sunkissed.. ( praying for no S gene )

[Hurley]

Kind of depends on what you believe, I think.

One side note is I don't think a ton of Sunkissed x Sunkissed pairings ARE being done. I think the majority of breeding animals out there now are being outcrossed to create projects.

Second sidenote...as far as I'm concerned, ANY animal descended from Sunkisseds should be considered possible S-factored and I'd put the percentage somewhere around 50%. The two genes originated together, anything from the line unless proven clear could have had stargazing trickle down to it, and believe me, it's fairly easy for a recessive gene to stay hidden for a few generations if you don't happen to strike the correct crossing.

Think of the incidence of amel in the commercial genepool. How surprised is anyone if some random pairing produces pink noses? S-factor can certainly be considered the same within the Sunkissed descended lines, especially if a ton of outcrossing has been done (and it has). This is the best way known to man to spread a recessive gene like wildfire. Happens all the time. "Eek, there's a bad gene, outcross, outcross!" This doesn't reduce the incidence of the gene, just hides it for a generation or two and widens its impact.

The good news is we have the knowledge and the ability to start testing our stock. We have a registry to help track not only carriers, but presumed NON-carriers (as well as trace back wrongfully tagged non-carriers if need be). Known carriers will be proven out and start to become available those interested in clearing their stock will have the chance to in time.

As Joe said, though you'd hate to see a couple gazers show up, it affects, at most, 1/4 the clutch. That's when your ethics come into play and you get a chance to find out what you believe and what you don't. Since I've never been much for hiding what I think I'll tell you that if I have a "something special" and it's from sunkissed lines and it tests positively S-factored...I'm still going to recover that "something special". Sure, it's going to take me some testing of progeny down the line, but if it's worth preserving, I'd have the knowledge and the ability to test it out down the line and keep my "something special" going. However, I also have the cull ethic and yes, I can put down hatchlings like I do mice and use them as feeders and still sleep at night. That's what I mean when I say your own personal ethics comes into play. My ethics would not let me sell those hatchlings out to others (at least without full disclosure of their gazer status and percentage possible het), but my ethics would let me cull hatchlings to recover "something specials" and test them out to get clear ones, just like my ethics allow me to euthanize gazers for research and raise them up to try and get homozygous testers to make KNOWN hets without testing. My ethic is mine and falls within the bounds of what I believe and I don't expect everyone to hold the same views on all the issues at play in the situation above.

It gets sticky in so many places and you have to spend some time drawing lines in the sand and see which fits you best. The thing is...with all of these issues, there IS no right answer. There is only what each individual believes and the attempt to keep everyone as informed as possible.

I think we're making a start.

[Cornsnakesalive]

My first reaction when I began thinking about the Sfactor in my Sunkissed was to stop all projects and test my original Sunkissed. This would hopefully prove out the offspring that I have produce from them, of which most are out crossed projects. I have however, recovered the Sunkissed gene in three different projects now, from perhaps 20 clutches and I may have one clutch with the gene pop up in it. This doesn’t really prove anything because I know very well how lucky I was to actually pair up the right poss het Lavas to produce the first one.

My first knee jerk reaction was that it would be great to find Sfactor positive Corns and test out the Sunkissed that I have used to make projects with. This was not possible, so my second thought was that since I have a male Sunkissed 50% poss het Sfactor, that I will just breed him to every Sunkissed female that I have and see if I get a hit. Then, I started thinking about the wisdom of breeding a known 50% poss het Sfactor at all, especially to females that are not directly suspected of carrying the gene.

If Hurley is right about 50% of Sunkissed line Corns possibly carrying the Sfactor gene, then we would start getting hits one right after another. I have not had the Sunkissed gene that long, but I have produced Sunkissed from different lines for two years now. Rich Z and Don S are producing Sunkissed and have had them on their list for several years now. I do not believe that Don puts anything on his price list unless he expects to produce a certain number of them which is quite a few. You would think that Don S, Rich Z, myself or anybody else that bred Sunkissed lines together would run into the gene or has already seen it if the percentages are that high.

Maybe we should just ask them both. These types of things are perhaps not something that is spoken about much and like myself, I just popped the heads off of the ones I saw last year and totally forgot about them. They went into my memory file of all of the other ways that baby Corns don’t make it. There must be a fatal gene for Corns not eating because there is a significant percentage of them that just won’t eat. Over all, there averages out to be several in most clutches and there is more kinking that most talk about. These are all types of fatal genes.

In the end, I decide that I should not breed my Sunkissed Male 50% poss het Sfactor unless he is tested to a female who is a known carrier, but I should not put him down because he can be used to prove his offspring clean too. If he did not have any offspring I don’t know what I would do.

Now what about my Okeetee female that proved to be het for Sunkissed last year? I really had no idea that she was from that line, and I guess should be considered a poss Sfactor carrier. Last year, I bred her to my male Sunkissed and a beautiful clutch of healthy babies were produced. I have used other Kathy Love Okeetees for other projects. Can we do a search to see if they were from the same line as the Sunkissed came from? Or is it too late for that? How far do we need to go?

I personally do not believe the percentages of offspring from the Sunkissed Lines is anywhere near 50%, but this may be the case close to lines with known Sfactor carriers. This is where there is a difference when this information is known. I will have more and more Sunkissed Projects coming of age very soon, so I may get more surprises than I expect. We have to in-breed to recover the Sunkissed gene, so it would seem that we would start to come across the Sfactor gene more often. Next year, I will have some Het Sunkissed Blood poss Anery, and Het Sunkissed Anery Striped Projects start producing. It will be interesting to see the relationship between the recovery of the Sunkissed gene, compared to the Sfactor.

Of course, the Sfactor will pop up along side of my Sunkissed Bloods. What will I do? Raise them up, and post them in a progression thread, that’s what I will do!

[TandJ]

Connie mentioned the following..

The good news is we have the knowledge and the ability to start testing our stock.

Exactly Connie.. I can't disagree with that at all... Before my hugh post went bye bye on being timed out, I pretty much echoed what Connie and Joe both said.. Essentially the community can work together towards a common goal, and share the results, as it will not hurt anyones stock, rather help improve the stock..

Joe made a valid point, essentially I may have gone the wrong route and will have half a clutch of potential carriers or not even carrying the S factor genetics.. What do you do when you start a completely new project, and you come to find out there might be something undesirable in the works.. Essentially it is a coin toss at this point.. Do I breed the the off srping together , or do I bred Dad to his daughters and have a hugh group of potential Gene factored babies?

Regards.. Tim of T and J

[Serpwidgets]

Originally Posted by Cornsnakesalive

If Hurley is right about 50% of Sunkissed line Corns possibly carrying the Sfactor gene, then we would start getting hits one right after another. I have not had the Sunkissed gene that long, but I have produced Sunkissed from different lines for two years now. Rich Z and Don S are producing Sunkissed and have had them on their list for several years now. I do not believe that Don puts anything on his price list unless he expects to produce a certain number of them which is quite a few. You would think that Don S, Rich Z, myself or anybody else that bred Sunkissed lines together would run into the gene or has already seen it if the percentages are that high.

Well the gene frequencies don't change unless selection pressure is applied in one direction or another. I believe Kathy had said that when she had ones that produced stargazers she had avoided pairing them to each other anymore, but I don't know if she actually went so far as culling proven carriers. She would have to answer that though.

One factor is I don't know if others are even aware of what they would be looking for, or if they would shout it from the mountaintops if they did hatch stargazers and they knew it for certain.

But anyway, here's another example: Trance (the lavender I used to make our hets for sun/lav) is het amel. Did you hatch any amels from them yet? I've paired ChodaBoy with Leese and Saffi, and I've paired Orgazmo with Leese and Georgi. So far not a single amel in 2006 or 2007. But we know for a fact that the amel gene is somewhere in those lines and it's just a matter of pairing up the "right" snakes.

[MohrSnakes]

Originally Posted by Cornsnakesalive

Rich Z and Don S are producing Sunkissed and have had them on their list for several years now.

Yep. And how well are they tracking their animals and how far have they been spread out there? Personally, I have sunkissed from both of those guys AND Kathy and a pair of het sunkissed bloods from Joe. I've got them everywhere and no easy way to test them all out unless I undertake the process myself. Plus, I don't know the relationship of any of them to each other or other sunkissed so bloodline is a dead end there.

Since I got my first sunkissed a few years back from Don I've bred sunkissed into Anery Stripe, Anery Motley, Blood, Caramel, Butter and a few other project animals and have tons of hets. I must have 30+ animals now with the sunkissed gene that I kept and oodles more that I sold off before I new S-factor existed. What now?

The way I see it, the best way for me to see if I have the S-factor gene is through all my holdbacks (or through a proven S-factored animal). If some of my holdback pairings show the S-factor then I should be able to trace it back to the parents that I started out with. This isn't a great chance since I'll be working with pos het but it could happen. Until there are large numbers of testers, though, I don't see any other way.

[kathylove]

I no longer keep sunkissed as I never liked them that well (even though here is where they showed up first - bummer!), I didn't think they looked different enough or "cool" enough to deal with the stargazer genes, and I didn't like the vicious personality ether. So I never crossed them into anything else because I didn't want to have to deal with possible star gazers throughout my collection.

Now that I no longer have them, the gene is restricted to my okeetee line ( at least in my collection), of which 2 males are still here that are known carriers. I should know more about which younger females may be carriers when this year's eggs hatch. That is, it is only in okeetees EXCEPT that I used an okeetee a LONG time ago to make some pretty stripes, and the star gazing gene has carried down this line a few generations into a striped bloodred project I am working on now. Last year was the first time I bred the brother / sister trio and had a couple of star gazers hatch. I gave them to Connie for further study. Now I know that at least one pair is carrying the unwanted gene. I am thinking of ending the line here and starting over using unrelated blood stripes (already have an unrelated male from Rich Hume).

Connie was very helpful a couple of years ago in going through all of my old okeetee / sunkissed records and computerizing them to figure out which males and females have produced gazers. So I do have a list now and soon hope to add the S factor on all of the ACR records of the appropriate okeetees.

In summary, all I ever really did to contain the gene was not to cross it into anything else (except by mistake, using an okeetee before I knew about the gene), by trying to isolate it to the okeetee line, by keeping records of those that produced gazers, and letting customers in on it to deal with as they wanted. I certainly wasn't very successful in totally eliminating it. Now that I have thinned down the collection, I hope to breed every female to one of the known carriers and to completely eliminate it within a couple more years. And I will be unlikely to keep anything from new sources for my own collection if I suspect it has any sunkissed in it, unless there is some special circumstance.

(BTW, is there a spell check here? Didn't notice one - thanks!)