Gobi

Burger Balls - 2018: "6 years ago I purchased an extremely good looking Firefly male. When I picked it up and actually saw him for the first time live I was just amazed…

The breeder had other Fireflys from the same clutch but none of them looked similar to him. Of course that did cost a little extra, but I really couldn’t care less after I saw him and fell in love right away.

He was so bright and colorful at the same time that I was just dazzled. The contrast between this brightness and the deep colors made him so very special.

Time went by and he was just the perfect pet, he ate well and grew properly.

We all know that young ball pythons tend to be more colorful than they‘re going to the be when they are adults.

But this Firefly was different, he just stayed as bright as he was, he even got a little brighter, so I couldn’t wait to finally breed him.

Then, 2013 I got the first offsprings…

I have to say, all the animals of the 3 clutches he sired looked great, but some of them were just outstanding and didn’t quite fit to what they were supposed to be.

Most of them I‘ve kept back, but a few I sold just as pretty nice individuals.

The following two years he sired more clutches and in every one were one or two very special snakes. Slowly it made me wonder, if my Firefly is just a Pastel Fire combo or if there‘s more going on.

I was talking to other breeders, let people make a guess and the results were always the same:

There has to be something more!

From Vanilla, Orange Dream, Desert Ghost, Blaze to a special Fire line or actually something new, I‘ve heard and checked it all. I even tracked the ancestors back to the USA, but they were all "normal“ mutations, so I couldn’t just name it after something already existing. That’s why I started to add to the special offsprings the letter X.

But how can I sell them as something new if I didn’t isolate the single gene yet? So I kept them back again or sold them for a little "beauty extra“

Now, just to clarify, because it sounds like I had 50+ odd looking offsprings from numerous clutches. We‘re talking about 18 snakes from 8 clutches, so we‘re pretty much at the beginning.

Last year I finally got the first single gene X individual, so you can see how long it can take to work on a project like this.

While the X-gene already exists at JKR and these bright colors can be only found in the deserts of our world I named this gene simply THE GOBI BALL." ^[1]