Indy

Just before the year 2000 I bought in a pet shop an adult wild caught female boa that was very strange looking for the standards at that time.

She wasn’t aesthetically pretty since in those years people were looking for clean and regular looking animals, instead she was very dark colored, had a very different and irregular pattern and had one eye colored differently from the other.

When I bred this female for the first time with a hypo male the clutch was very small but all babies had a very strange colors and patterns. The strangest baby was a female that I kept for future breeding.

At that time I just started breeding boas and still did not know much about genetics. Also morphs were still very rare and not well defined.

The strange hypo daughter of the original female was then bred to a male motley, one of the first motleys imported to Europe.

I kept from this litter a male hypo motley that was the most striped and had very vivid colors with intense purples. It was obvious that this male had a new gene in it.

The male was then bred for the first time in the 2011/12 season with a female pastel Boaline line. The result of this breeding was a clutch of 11 babies, one of which was a female motley totally striped. Initially I thought it was just a case of luck, but with a closed look I noticed that all other littermates had very strange striped like patterns.

During the same year I also bred a female hypo jungle that resulted in a very strange looking litter including some totally striped hypo motley jungles.

The following year I bred the male hypo motley with a normal hypo female and just like in the other litters, most babies had very aberrant patterns including a hypo motley male that was totally striped, just like the 2012 motley and hypo jungle motley. This is about the time when I started to believe that it wasn’t only a random case.

In 2015 my first clutch was from a female Indy Motley 2012 x male Indy Hypo Motley 2013 and I finally was sure it was a new genetic trait. Most babies were identical to the parents, non motley babies expressed the markers of the Indy gene, while the rest were super motleys.

In order to have more proof on the genetics, in 2015/16 I repeated the same breeding between female Indy Motley 2012 x male Indy Hypo Motley 2013. Once again I had proof that the Indy gene (dominant gene) was stable and produced the same results as the previous year. Breeding season 2015-2016

During the same season I bred the female Indy Hypo Motley Jungle 2012 x male Sunglow PK. The results were the same as the previous clutches so once more I had proof that the Indy gene was a simple dominant gene that transmitted to 60% of the clutch.

A lot of the babies from this clutch had pink tongues like albinos or bicolor tongues (pink and black).
My thought was that this may be a form of jungle, but the jungle gene mixed with the Indy gene modifies the striped pattern. ^[1]