Announcing MorphMarket Projects!

If you're a keeper, do you want to:

• See what genetics your favorite breeders are working with right now?
• Discover animals that are about to hit the market so you can be first in line?
• Get automatically alerted on hatched animals that meet your specific criteria without even having to check the site?

If you're a breeder, do you want to:

• Market your brand in new ways and to engage and grow your following?
• Generate more excitement around the genetic projects you are working with?
• Reach potential buyers earlier so that your established animals sell quicker?

If so, you are going to love MorphMarket Projects.

MorphMarket Projects creates a whole new way to discover animals & share with the community. Browse, search, and get alerts on breeding activity. Users can discover and engage with animals prior to their listing for sale. Right now this includes offspring groups and in the future will even include pairings!

This kind of sharing and engagement already happens on big tech social media sites every day. So why shouldn't MorphMarket, as the biggest reptile platform in the world, provide you with the same capability? Like our marketplace, our technology is customized to be even more powerful and specific to the community's needs.

Using projects will be familiar because it parallels the system we already have in place for listings.

• Browse: On the trait index page, there's a new tab called Projects. Toggle to this tab to see counts of projects per species and trait.
• Search: Explore all the offspring by breeders using many of the same powerful filters available to Listing search. Offspring cards display information about pairing, offspring count and birth dates.
• Alert: Save searches to get alerted by phone or email new offspring are produced which match the criteria.

Breeders can get their offspring into this system by adding it via the Offspring manager. This is accessed through the Offspring item on the menu or by the egg icon in the sidebar. Offspring groups which meet these criteria will show up publicly for users to see:

• Visibility must be set to Public. Just like with listings, you can choose which items are visible to users and which are for your eyes only.
• Groups need to have at least one parent assigned.
• Either one of the parents or the group needs to have a photo.
• This feature is available to breeders with at least a Basic membership.

This is just the beginning. In the future we will be adding more features for engaging with projects such as:

• Save/favorite offspring groups
• Follow updates on individual groups
• Waitlist or inquire on groups

MorphMarket Projects creates a whole new way for you to explore the community's activity, reach potential buyers, and show off your amazing animals. Let us know what you think!

We’ve updated our policy regarding the use of the Dwarf and Super Dwarf trait tags in reticulated pythons.

In reticulated pythons, the terms Dwarf and Super Dwarf (D and SD) do not refer to "morphs" in the common use of the term. They refer to the locales from which the animals originated.

Very specific islands in Indonesia are home to reticulated pythons that mature at much smaller sizes than their mainland counterparts. Crossbreeding—in particular with mainland retics to introduce morph varieties into the smaller animals—has necessitated the need for clear definitions to help ensure buyers have reasonable expectations for an animal’s mature size.

While an animal’s locality percentage does not provide certainty for the animal’s mature size, it is currently one of the best indicators available.

It’s important to have a definition for these terms for them to be understood and useful. Up until now, we have not enforced any specific definitions for these tags. Going forward, we will be enforcing the industry-accepted definitions for the use of these tags in all current and future MorphMarket ads.

• To use the plain D or SD, the locales in an animal’s lineage must add up to at least 50%. Because SD is a subset of D, SD locales may be included in defining an animal as D, but D locales may not be included in the math used to define SD.
• All retic ads that use the tags D and/or SD must include percentages of locales in the description field. If a seller is unsure, then they may not use those tags. (While not required, we strongly encourage sellers to also include sire and dam with their percentages, when known.)

What can breeders do if exact percentages are not known?

• Locale tags may still be used when the seller is certain of the locale, but either uncertain of % or if less than 50%.
• We have introduced Unknown (Super dwarf) and Unknown (dwarf) tags which can be used like the other locale tags. These can be used without knowing exact locales or percentages.
• Users will still find your animals in all the other ways, including latest listings, genetic traits or other characteristics.

Please review this support article for a full explanation of the definitions and rules MorphMarket will be enforcing when it comes to the use of these two tags.

We understand that this update may be challenging for sellers without known bloodlines; however we believe that it is important for these terms to be meaningful and useful.

We are excited to announce a major update to our genetic calculator. This update adds support for allelic recessive genes. Also known as "visual hets", these are different recessive genes which can combine to create visual outcomes. Read on to learn about this and some other improvements.

1. Support for Allelic Recessives

In 2015, MorphMarket launched its platform with a genetics engine that powered its calculator and trait extractor. This system was later extended to other species.

One innovative feature of our calculator was the support for possible het output. For instance, when breeding a het recessive to a wild type, each baby will be either het or wild type, but a person can't tell from looking which is which. Each baby has a 50% chance of being het, so the calculator will label each one as “50% possible het”.

Yet there was a limitation in that it did not correctly model allelic recessive traits. Output for these combos included a disclaimer explaining that it was not fully modeled.

For example, in Ball Pythons, the Albino trait and the Candy trait are both recessive traits, but they share the same locus. A ball python cannot be both fully Albino and fully Candy, but it can be 50% of each, or "Double Het (DH)" for both. So if you breed a DH Albino Candy to a Normal, the calculator. would output "100% 50% ph Albino and 50% ph Candy". The correct output, which is now displayed, is "100% Het Albino OR Het Candy". This is because either one or the other gene must be passed on to all offspring.

These improvements are not limited to Ball Pythons of course. This fixes issues with visual recessives across Boa Constrictors, Reticulated Pythons, and Corn Snakes, to name a few.

2. Updated Gene Complex Data

We have updated our engine's knowledge of complexes from feedback in our forums. If we are missing any data please comment on this in the appropriate forum discussions.

3. Improved Offspring Generation

If you have used MorphMarket's Offspring Groups to track and advertise your breeding history, you have noticed that our wizard will assist by automatically adding traits to offspring that you add.

Initially, traits added were those which would be inherited 100% of the time. Now, we add traits which are most likely to be inherited, to minimize the number of updates you have to make to those offspring. For example, in a het x het scenario, the system pre-assigns all offspring to be 66% PH. You would now only have to update 25% to visuals, which reduces the data entry by 75%.

4. Simplification of Het Display

A simple but elegant change is that we now display 100% Het traits on the site as just “Het.” Het implies 100%, so there's no need to state this explicitly. This makes the interface a bit cleaner. We still need to update this in the select inputs but it is rendered in the new way on all pages.

5. Maximum Trait Count Increased

The calculator previously refused to process breeding pairs with more than 10 total genes. Thanks to optimizations in the algorithm, it now supports up to 14 traits. This is very helpful in Corn Snakes where there tend to be a high number of traits.

What's Left?

One thing that is still not resolved for ads is the representation of trait disjunctions. That is, the traits on ads do not yet allow sellers to label an animal as having trait A OR B. This is tricky for a few reasons, not the least of which is the interface to input this data.

We're glad to have finally tackled the tough issues mentioned above that pave the way for even more great improvements to come! These were important as we will be leveraging the calculator more extensively throughout the site in features for animal management.

We are preparing to promote a number of new subcategories to top level this year with all the trimmings: trait tags, subcategories, store listings, calculators, etc.

We are conducting a survey of these species and need your input. Would you help us by reviewing our draft and providing feedback on anything we're missing or mistaken about?

The ones ready for you review are:

• Chameleons
• Tree Boas
• Tegus
• Bullsnakes

Thanks! John