Because I just feel like it, behold my unpopular corn snake genetics pet hypotheses:
1- Red Factor is actually at least 2 different genes, and more likely 3+ genes.
My reasoning:
Different lineages have different rates for when the pink shows up. The more common lines show up at birth to 1 month to varying degrees, and then there are lines where color doesn't start to show at all for 3 to 6 months and is pretty much never present at birth.
The lines different breeders developed were initially visually distinct. Champagne snows looked very different from JMG coral snows and both looked different from Poppycorn's Starburst (the most vibrant red factor snows ever produced). One of my breeder friends lines were mostly comprised of JMG and Champagne, and those are the lineages present in Luri.
Some lineages produce color almost exclusively in the ground color, leaving the saddles mostly white. Other lines have the saddles showing the most color and the ground color being primarily white.
My conclusion: the best red factor snows actually have more than one "type" of red factor (or are descended from Starburst snows, but i don't know anyone who actually kept the line alive)
2- Pied-sided is not a recessive trait, it is a natural "consequence" of breeding for better and better diffusion.
My reasoning:
There are supposedly 2 incompatible lines of pied-sided, which most people seem to have forgotten about (just like they forgot that coral snow once meant a hypo snow, no pink necessary). These lines are the McDonald's and the SMR lines. McDonald's actually had higher expression than SMR to begin with. Visually these two lines are utterly identical, but i don't think I've seen anyone taking about them as distinct for at least a decade.
Pied-sided can ONLY be visible when the snake is also a visual diffused.
And not just any diffused. Every pied-sided animal I've seen has had a very good quality of expression of the diffused gene. This high diffusion is the result of selective breeding, and might explain why the two lines were considered incompatible, if the selective genes were different in each line and this didn't match up.
High expression pied-sided parents can still produce offspring with no visible pied-siding. Someone recently posted a clutch result from one high-expression to a medium-expression pied-sided and the babies were all medium to high expression pied-sided... except for one with no pied-sided at all. This particular baby had mediocre diffusion and was the only baby in the clutch with mediocre diffusion.
My conclusion: pied-sided is the natural result of breeding for better and better diffusion, what with the diffused gene already doing things like removing the belly checkers and the lateral patterning.
