Transcription
Hey guys, welcome back to the vlog. This week we're talking all about the zebra project. All right guys, so I have two zebras here. Now zebra is a recessive project started by Steve Rousus, who is just kind of one of our iconic early ball python breeders. And here in my hands, I have a regular zebra and a lace zebra. So let's look at them up close and talk a little bit more about this project. We want to start with just kind of the most bare bones version of something so you can get an idea of why we like these projects so much and what's unique about them.
So, all right. So, we have a regular zebra here. So, you can see a regular zebra. You might at first glance think it almost looks like a normal, but this is actually a recessive trait with some unique patterning. It also has a very unique color to it. So, it's a little bit brassy is what I would say. Compared to a normal, it has a little bit more of almost like a metallic, you know, copper color. But the cool thing about it is it has some very unique banding and patterning. So, you have these mismatched bands. You come up to the dorsal and then they don't line up correctly and it gives it this really cool almost like a zipper pattern and it's a really really neat effect. Now here's a great example of it right here at the right on the neck. You can see the pattern come up and then is like almost like checkerboards black on either side of the stripe. It's a really cool look.
Now we're going to pull out the next one which is a lace zebra which lace of course does not have a huge pattern difference except for all the sides but it makes things much brighter. But look at that kind of zippered pattern, especially right in here and on the neck. It is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And then the lace brightens it up a lot. Almost gives it that slightly desert ghost type look. It's really quite beautiful. And this is just a single copy of lace. We're looking very much forward to seeing the white lace version in a few years.
Now, before we move on to some other combos, I wanted to highlight the pastel zebra because the pastel works amazing with zebra. In fact, we talked about this recently in our pastel video, but it keeps a lot of that really cool kind of zippered pattern all the way down. That copper color that's in zebras really translates to really bright in the pastel and the contrast pops out in an amazing way. So, this is a pastel zebra. It's double head clown pied, which will be interesting down the road to see what that looks like. But just check out that cool pattern. And to me, zebra is a project that pastel works amazing in. And if you have some pastel animals and you're not sure which project is really the best place for them, Zebra is one of those amazing projects. And if you're curious about other ones, make sure to check out our video about the pastel project.
So, now we're going to start moving into some of the combos we've been working with and some of the ideas we've had to try to bring out some cool interesting new patterns by leveraging the zebra with some of the known combos we already have. So, we're going to kind of take you on a step. This animal is actually slightly in shed looks like. But this is the hurricane yellow belly zebra. And we fully tested it, but you see the hurricane is really disrupting the pattern a lot. It's reducing it like giving a lot of space in between. A lot of the granite kind of hooking you see from the hurricane is barely showing. You can only see it in a couple spots, but the pattern so spread out. And then you have, of course, the bands come up real narrow and drop down the other side. It's a unique look. Very very heavy checkering on the belly from the yellow belly and the hurricane together. But this is a really cool animal.
We have another animal that adds one more gene to this. So here's one of the yearling males we made last year and this one has one more gene added. So this one is hurricane yellow belly and then a gene called Russo which is part of the blue-eyed Lucy complex. It's a brightening kind of enhancing gene and just look at how beautiful beautiful this boy is. I love the color brightness and you can see compared to just the regular the little tiny baby we just hatched. The brightness is really coming out and you get that same really interesting pattern. And I keep mentioning the pattern because that's what Brzeb is really bringing to the table on this and it's giving it a pattern that we haven't seen that you can get a different way with that really narrow banding and a little bit of hooking here and everything. It's a very cool animal which is why we call the zebra. It's the striping. It's the mismatch pattern. Okay, talk to me in 10 years about the if they have the DG Zebra, that would be really cool.
So guys, our channel is sponsored by Clutch, which is our ball python collection management software, and it is amazing for searching through your collection and finding out exactly what you have, especially if you have a large collection like ours. I can quickly look through, look up all the zebras, all the heads, which codes, and the exact stats to help me make great decisions about any project. Be sure to check it out. We have a 30-day free trial in the link below.
So, another new combo. This hatched just a few weeks ago. This is the blackhead yellow belly zebra. And it was an interesting experience to see what blackhead and some of these dark dark mutations will do in the zebra project. All right. So, this one I think honestly you can see a little bit of the striping elements here in the neck. We have one band across, but I would say the black head at least in this exact form kind of took away from that cool kind of patterning that we see in the zebras. You do have a kind of a funky pattern, kind of mixed up pattern, but in a lot of ways, I think blackhead almost overwhelmed this combo. That doesn't mean that this can't lead to some really, really crazy stuff with some other jeans that look great cuz we know like leopard and blackhead are very reactive. We know that blackhead and spot nose force ail combination very reactive. So, this might still be a stepping stone to some really interesting new zebra combos down the road. We want to show this kind of where it's headed and what this combo looks like now that we just made it.
All right, so these next two are also yearlings. And this really shows a direction that I'm just loving this project in. We've gone pretty hard on the lace stuff. We showed you the lace zebra earlier. Now, these are combos of it. We have lace spot nose zebra and a lace yellow belly zebra. Let's take a look at them.
So, the spot nose, you can see we have that crazy pattern that spot nose brings in. See, this one's coming directly towards the camera. But this is a very, very unique pattern. And I just love how the brassiness kind of of the zebra works. And it just gives it this really cool color, I guess. Crazy sides there from the lace coming up. It was negative for yellow belly when we shed tested. And just that zipper-l like that is so cool.
So this one I like even better than the spotnas version. This is the lace yellow belly zebra. And you see has some really awesome bands all throughout like these bars. Again, that same kind of brassy pattern, but then the sides completely kind of deconstruct. Top zippered look deconstructs into just basically pixels all the way down the side. And to me, this is such a really, really cool look to work off of. Maybe make the white lace version and then add some color in here with pastel and orange dream and some of those bright morphs and see what it does to the pattern and really make that color pop.
So, the last one is the double recessive. This is our first double recessive with zebra and it's the spot-nose zebra clown. So, we actually showed this one when it was a baby and honestly it looks way better now. That color palette that comes in from the zebra really shows through great in the clown and the spot nose of course really adds to the pattern. Spot is so reactive with the clown. It's a really strong pattern. Now, we still have not made a regular zebra clown to compare it to, but I just love the kind of the elements of this snake. It has the backstripe, the black back of a clown. Check out these little like widow's peaks, these little kind of dripping barbwire look all the way down. And it seems to be like that's going to be one of the hallmarks of the zebra and the clown. Plus, the color. Both Zebra and Spotnos are fighting pretty hard with that clown pattern, which makes me super excited to see so many of the really awesome kind of iconic clown combos that have been made. We've gone so far in clown and so we're just getting started with zebra. So, be really interesting to see how some of these combos will look, how different they look with zebra. And it might open up an entire new world of clown combos and zebra combos for us to explore.
So, that's it. Let me know what you think of the zebra project. What's your favorite animal from this video? And do you like the project in general? Is it morph that you're working with and excited about? Let us know in the comments below. And we'll see you again next week.