Morphs 101:

I mentioned in my previous post that Monty is a “normal” or wild-type Royal Python, which is to say she is not a visual “morph” (nor is she Morph – although that would be all kinds of awesome!). The term ‘morph’ is used to describe, in simple terms, genetic mutations resulting in visual variations of colour or pattern (or both). I won’t go into too much depth here as the topic of genetics can get quite lengthy and complex, especially when we start talking about heterozygous and homozygous pairings, and recessive / dominant / co-dominant genes, so I’ll gloss over all that for now.


These variations (morphs), of which there are dozens, occur naturally in the wild, although some are rarer than others, and can be selectively bred in captivity to produce offspring of the same morph. Additionally, two of the same morph can be paired together to produce a good example of that morph - similarly to how for example a breeder of pedigree dogs would choose a male and a female that display the strongest characteristics of that particular breed, in order to produce pups which in turn inherit those defining characteristics. In snakes, these individual morphs all have unique names (often chosen by the breeder who first proved that gene by producing offspring of the same) and the characteristics can range from being quite subtle, to very obvious – Albino being a good example of a more obvious one.

As well as selectively breeding one morph to produce more of the same, or two of the same morph to produce very good examples of that particular morph, breeders can also pair together two snakes of different morphs to produce a “combo-morph” – offspring which display a combination of 2, 3 or even 4 different base morphs – which in very simplistic terms is just like mixing colours on a palette. This is where things get really interesting; with hundreds (if not thousands) of different combinations being possible, and new previously unseen combo-morphs seemingly being produced each year, resulting in some truly fascinating and wildly differing hatchlings being born every year – and this is all completely within the reach of your average hobbyist breeder, with some triple or quad-gene combo-morphs selling for the kind of prices you’d expect of a half decent second hand sports car…

I shit thee not!