Boa Constrictor morph
Boa Constrictor (Boa constrictor)
Visual Central American Albino. Homozygous at Central American Albino locus. Orange and yellow on white coloration with pink to red eyes. Third independent amelanistic locus in boa constrictors, confirmed non-allelic with both Kahl and Sharp through complementation testing. Less common than Kahl or Sharp in the commercial hobby.
The Central American Albino locus is the third confirmed independent albino locus in Boa constrictor. Homozygous animals are amelanistic with orange/yellow-on-white coloration and pink to red eyes, visually similar to the Kahl and Sharp strains. Central American Albino is confirmed non-allelic with both Kahl and Sharp through complementation testing: crossing Central American x Kahl or Central American x Sharp produces phenotypically normal double-het offspring in all cases. This mirrors the exact pattern of the three independent albino strains in leopard geckos (Tremper, Bell, Rainwater), confirming that multiple independent mutations can produce the same phenotypic outcome at different steps in the melanin synthesis pathway. Central American Albino is the least common of the three boa albino strains in the commercial hobby and is primarily maintained by specialist breeders tracking strain identity carefully.
How to identify it: Central American Albino (ca/ca): Orange and yellow on white coloration with pink to red eyes. Visually indistinguishable from Kahl or Sharp Albino by appearance alone. Definitive strain identification requires complementation testing (crossing to known visual Kahl and known visual Sharp). If the cross to Kahl produces all normal-looking offspring and the cross to Sharp also produces all normal-looking offspring, the animal is confirmed Central American Albino at a separate locus from both. Heterozygous carriers (het CA) appear phenotypically normal.
Central American Albino follows a recessive inheritance pattern, carried on the Central American Albino allele (locus CAAlb).
Because Central American Albino is recessive, an animal needs two copies of the allele to show the trait visually. An animal with a single copy is called het central american albino (heterozygous). A het animal looks normal but carries the gene, so pairing two het central american albino animals produces, on average, one in four visual central american albino offspring.
ReptiDex keeps morph, lineage, and pairing records for your whole collection, on iOS and the web.
Get started free