#okeetee

(Also tysm i love your blog you are amazing)

Hiiiiii and thank you and we love you, too!

Okay so Okeetee is a selectively-bred color morph that was discovered at the Okeetee Hunt Club in South Carolina.

Most recognized color morphs in corn snakes, like Amel, are simple recessive traits. That means one gene with two switches (alleles) in the "on" or "off" position.

Both on is called homozygous, and the gene is expressed visually.

One off, one on is called heterozygous, and the snake looks normal or "wild type" but can pass the "on" allele to their offspring.

Both off, homozygous, wild type snake.

Genes code for everything, from the size of a snake's organs to the length of their tail to the amount of pigment on each individual scale, and most of the genetic instructions are minute and subtle. Like, snake A has saddle borders that are the tiniest bit wider than snake B. It's the result of natural variation within a species, just like how a human person and their siblings all look similar but also distinct.

A selectively-bred color morph means not selecting for one single major gene mutation that affects the entire organism, but instead a whole suite of minor genes that do little things, and emphasizing those traits over many generations. That's how most dog and cat breeds were developed and that's how locality morphs like Okeetee work. It's a lot of genes that have been emphasized to create a snake that has the best fitness for their environment and/or the best likelihood of being selected to produce the next generation.

In the case of the Okeetee locality, snakes have high contrast colors, bright reds, and thick black saddle borders. These traits have been emphasized by choosing the highest-contrast snakes with the thickest, darkest borders and breeding those together. The result is a strikingly beautiful snake. By introducing the simple recessive Amel gene with selectively-bred Okeetee, we get Reverse Okeetees with thick white saddle borders and bright oranges.

The issue, however, is that Okeetee is not an on/off genetic mutation like Amel. It's a selectively-bred emphasis on naturally-occurring variation. That means it can be easily diluted if an Okeetee-type is bred to a non-Okeetee-type snake, and there's no heterozygous form of the morph because it's not one gene.

Think like if you had two cups of apple juice that sell for $1 each and you poured half from both cups into a third cup. The third cup is also apple juice, and it's worth $1! But if you have one cup of apple juice and one cup of just water, which is free, and you mix those, the result is a diluted apple drink that's half water. Should you still charge $1 for it? Is that morally ethical? What if you continue to dilute the apple drink, pouring half of what was in the last cup and half water, over and over until it doesn't even smell faintly of apple? At what specific point did this cease to be apple drink, and when do you stop charging a dollar for it? A less scrupulous or uneducated seller might even sell a cup of mostly water for $1 as "het apple juice" when that's not even a thing.

That's what I so frequently see happening with Okeetees and that's why I don't like them. A low-quality Okeetee from a heavily diluted bloodline is just a normal wild-type corn snake, but folks still price them as if they were the real deal, and naïve buyers will pay for the name when they really don't even know what they're looking at.

Again, sorry to the Okeetee fans. You're not wrong for liking a pretty snake, it's just the popularity and the lack of breeding ethics surrounding them that makes my nose wrinkle.

my boy.

While okeetee is considered a morph, it is actually a locality where they are from. Okeetees are from South Carolina and display deep-red saddles with jet-black borders. They were one of the first types of corn snake morphs to be worked with, in the late 60s to early 70s, and greatly influenced the expansion of corn snake popularity. Okeetee can, of course, occur alongside other morphs and create combinations. Okeetee and reverse okeetee are not the same thing. It is not an expensive morph at all and a single gene okeetees will start out around $50-60.

Okeetee corn snake

Tessera okeetee corn snake