Hi Michael,
thx. But i am a little confused, to me Pied is something that occurs from birth and also has normal pattern on the normal colored places, like piebald ball pythons. And Calico also have normal pattern but start to lose color over time. Thats why i dont understand that you would rather call them piebald.
I got the wc female in September 2011 and i just looked at an old pic and it seems she gains more color and loses white unfortunately.
What do you think about the young (about 18 months) Calico x Calico male? On the newer pics its seems to me, that his colors start to fade. What would you say?
Greets
Ingo
First off, most of the Tokay 'morph' names where given to wild caught animals and never proved out in a domestic breeding program.
Calico falls hard in this category. No one has proven out what makes a 'calico' Tokay or even defined it. This goes for leucistic as well. Yes there are black eyed, white animals 'called' leucistic but breeding these Tokay together does not produce visuals either. You may have noticed that a lot of these white Tokay have hazel eyes and some sort of pattern in the patches. All of this is a far cry from a true blue eyed all white animal.
Typically, pied is simple recessive. If that's true here, then paired visuals should produce visuals. Of the 12 pairs of white Tokay that I've worked with so far, none of them has produced visuals at birth.
Then two things happened. A breeder here that works with patternless powder blues that are het for 'calico/leucistic' had one of her juveniles start to turn at about 5 months. I too had one in four offspring from my avatar girl also start to turn at about 8 months. (Both animals are documented in the morph thread of this forum.)
This led me to do some digging. And low and behold, I learned several things. First, there are several genetic pathways or genetic combinations that can produce similar looking morphs and second, that pied can be progressive in some animals including reptiles.
This description of the white starting to appear, and creep in during the maturing phase of the animals growth is very much in line with what we have seen so far. We have also seen the speckled 'calico' continue to change to a darker phase. I have a couple of wild caught that were sold to me as melanistic, but they have the white rings around their eyes and some yellow specs. i.e., they've completely turned almost fully black/gray.
The short version is that we are still several years away from proving out the genetics of Tokay beyond just naming wild caught animals. I have several, like the avatar girl, that have what appears to be three visual genes at work. I've only started to sort out two of them with her. The progressive pied being one of them.