The striping in this morph occurs when the dorsal spots and dashes happen to line up and connect with each other. From other breeder’s efforts, it appears that this striped phase of ball pythons is not genetic. At least, it appears that it is not passed on to offspring as a simple recessive or dominant gene. This could be a polygenetic or random mutation.

This is another morph that is often graded on its appearance. Striped animals may have a clean unbroken stripe or a few breaks in the stripe. Once animals start to show five or more breaks in their stripe, they begin to appear normal.

I have a nice group of stripes and am using the females as breeding stock. I may run a striped male to some normal females to produce “heterozygous” offspring. After all, just because the few striped animals that have been bred have not proven out, does not mean that my animals won’t. I am not holding my breath though.