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omg-snakes · 2 years

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In a recent clutch you posted you mentioned all the babies were masque, super masque or didn't have masque in them. Since there's all three in the clutch would you mind explaining what the masque gene does and how it varies in it's normal and super forms?

Oh you done did it now, friend. You went and asked the question. I hope you're ready for the answer because we're gonna get into it!

Masque is a hotly debated and poorly understood morph in general. What does it look like? How does it work? What does it even DO?

We'll dig in with the caveat that this is all still being explored and this information might change as we continue to gain understanding of the corn snake genome and how different genes express themselves.

I'll put this under a cut because y'all know by this point that I like to infodump and I don't want to pull a "Do You Love the Colour of the Snake?" on anybody.

So Masque came about because of the Bloodred morph. Bloodred was originally thought to be a single gene which caused pattern reduction, a white tummy, and deep brick red coloration. Breeders soon began to notice that outcrossing a Bloodred with another morph that was heterozygous for Bloodred was resulting in snakes with white tummies but not the same deep red, or pattern reduction on the head and tummy but not a solid white tummy! It was then that they began to realize that Bloodred was not a single gene but three genes being simultaneously expressed: Red Coat, a recessive red-enhancing trait; Diffused, a recessive pattern-reducing and belly checker-eliminating trait; and Masque, a dominant or possibly co-dominant trait which affects headstamp expression and causes an overall "brightening" color effect.

Since Diffused and Masque were discovered together, and Masque is a dominant trait, there's a really good chance that any Diffused snake is also displaying Masque. It's usually pretty easy to tell, just look at the headstamp! Let's take a look at Griswold, a Diffused Ghost corn snake. Here he is as a baby:

You can see how the pattern on his head is reduced to weird eyebrows and the patterning on his sides fades to just about nothing as it reaches his belly.

Here he is today:

(Excuse the chubby tum, he just had dinner and was kind enough to indulge me messing with him a little bit)

As you can see, he is definitely Diffused with that solid white belly and he's also displaying the Masque trait with the severely reduced headstamp.

So how do we know a snake is Masque without Diffused?

Chammers is here to help us out! One thing Masque does is cause overall lightening/brightening of color on a snake. Here's baby Chammers with a sibling. Can you tell the difference?

It's subtle, but the lighter colored Anery snake on the right is Mrs. Chamamndler Bing himself. In this early stage of life, his headstamp is not significantly different from his non-Masque sibling. But look at what happened as he got older:

And that brings us to today:

That looks a lot more like what we expect from a Masque, right?

And if you weren't 100% sure that Chammers is indeed Masque, we can take a look at his tummy:

You'll note a white line between the checkers, almost creating an "open zipper" pattern. All masques will have this white line down the middle, and the line is wider for high-expression Masques. Chammers is heterozygous for Masque, meaning he has only one copy of the gene, so he has a 50/50 chance of passing the gene down to any offspring he sires.

Okay so what the heck is a Super Masque? Remember me saying that Masque is potentially co-dominant? This term refers to a dominant trait that expresses somewhat when heterozygous but expresses more or differently when homozygous. Palmetto is a really good example of a co-dominant trait. A het Palmetto looks almost hypomelanistic, with bright coloration and reduced melanin. They don't look the same as a Palmetto but they're a different visual phenotype than a classic corn snake. A hom Palmetto is leucistic (all white) with color sprinkles.

Where it gets hairy is when we ask how to tell the difference between Masque and Super Masque. Some breeders claim that you can tell because the belly checkers will be almost completely absent and the headstamp will be reduced to just tiny eyebrows, as in MA22M1 here:

(Who is diffused, by the way)

But I've seen enough snakes to not feel confident agreeing with that assessment. Case in point: Pumpkin Spice.

Pumpkin Spice was the result of two Masque parents. Every clutch she has laid has been 100% Masque babies. Look at her tummy as a baby:

The split of her belly checkers is so wide that she barely has any checkers at all! So she's almost definitely a Super Masque, right?

But look at that headstamp over the years. :/

Despite everything else pointing to her being homozygous for Masque, her headstamp looks positively Classic. If anything, it's gotten LESS Masque-y over time!

So my assessment? Masque is more likely a simple dominant trait with low or high expression. I don't think it's co-dominant and it would take some evidence I haven't seen yet to convince me. I do, however, find that it's helpful to use "Super" for dominant traits like Masque, Tessera, etc. to indicate that a baby is homozygous for the trait as this may affect breeding plans and/or pricing.

There you go! I hope you got the answer you were looking for and that this was helpful in demystifying the gene and explaining my personal take on the situation.

#I must note that Chammers got spooked BAD by my cell phone camera and flipped out #I had to calm him and let him sniff it like ten times #He really hated it but he was a total champ and very brave despite being quite terrified of the scary rectangle #He's never had that issue before #Afterward I calmed him and just held him for a bit and he was okay as long as I wasn't pointing the camera at him.#Poor Chammers!#Chammers #Mrs. Chamamndler Bing #Chamma lamma ding-dong #Griswold #The Grizz #Grizzled #Pumpkin Spice #Pumpkin Spice doesn't have any nicknames because she's a queen and you don't nickname a queen #Hypo Masque corn snake #Ghost Diffused corn snake #Anery Masque corn snake #snake #snakes #reptile #reptiles #reptiblr #corn snake #corn snakes #text post #answers to questions #oh i'm sorry did you want an answer here have a novel #thank you for coming to my ted talk.#corn snake morphs #corn snake breeding

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omg-snakes · 5 years

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What the heck is this?

I ask myself while looking at the first of Pumpkin Spice and Griswold’s clutch, at the unexpectedly dark nose peeking up at me from inside its safe and gooey eggshell, at what appears to be a classic corn snake baby face.

What the heck. What the actual heck??

Griswold is a bloodred ghost, meaning that he is homozygous for Masque, Diffuse, Dilute, Anery, and Hypo. Pumpkin Spice is a high red Hypo Masque. We should be seeing exclusively Hypo Masque and Ghost Masque babies, and there is literally zero genetic likelihood that there would be a non-Hypo baby in the group. But here this little classic pip is staring at me, defying logic innocently, boggling my mind with their mere existence.

I grab my binder and scour notes, looking for an explanation. I find it on April 19th, an innocuous footnote on my breeding attempts. Pumpkin Spice was paired with Chammers but they didn’t seem interested in each other. No lock was observed, no breeding confirmed. I scrawled a date on a spreadsheet in pencil and moved on. On two occasions after this, P. Spice was observed successfully mating with Griswold and my rightful assumption was that he was the father of this clutch.

These genes tell a different story, though. A story in which Chammers did a sneaky job of impregnating Pumpkin Spice without me realizing and fathering her babies. I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known.

But I guess it’s true.

Pips don’t lie.

#It was a long road for that punchline.#thank you for staying with me the whole way #keep good notes everybody #the only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down #snake #snakes #reptile #reptiles #reptiblr #corn snake #corn snakes #baby snake #baby snakes

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