Coat/skin colour (CLCN2) Red Cornsnake
Montandon et al. (2025) investigated "a mono-locus trait with two recessive alleles, motley and stripe , that both cause pattern aberrations in the corn snake": "The wild-type pattern of the corn snake . . . consists of dorsal and lateral red blotches on an orange background, whereas the ventral scales exhibit black and white checkers. The Motley phenotype . . . is characterized by elongated dorsal blotches that tend to fuse together at the edges and reduced and less well-defined lateral blotches than the wild-type. As its name implies, this phenotype is highly variable alon
How it inherits
- One copy
- One copy shows nothing at all. The animal looks ordinary and is called a carrier, or “het”.
- Two copies
- Two copies, one from each parent, are needed before it appears.
Coat/skin colour (CLCN2) carrier × Coat/skin colour (CLCN2) carrier
Four ways the two can meet.
- het Coat/skin colour (CLCN2)50%
- Coat/skin colour (CLCN2)25%
- Normal25%
A pale box is an animal that shows the morph. These are the odds for each egg on its own, not a promise about a clutch.
What this rests on
A peer-reviewed paper identifies the variant behind this morph in the gene CLCN2.
- Regulatory and disruptive variants in the CLCN2 gene are associated with modified skin color pattern phenotypes in the corn snake. — Genome Biol 2025
- Color and pattern in snakes (Reptilia, Serpentes). — Journal of Herpetology 1978
What happens if you breed it
Every pairing involving Coat/skin colour (CLCN2), worked out gene by gene — including what the clutch can be and anything documented about the animals it produces.