Melanistic Common Garter Snake
Heavily increased black, giving an animal that is nearly uniformly dark with the stripes lost.
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.
Melanistic carrier × Melanistic carrier
Four ways the two can meet.
- het Melanistic50%
- Melanistic25%
- 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.
Worth knowing. Melanistic garter snakes also occur naturally in some wild populations, particularly around the Great Lakes, where dark animals warm faster in a cool climate. The trait in the hobby comes from those populations rather than from a mutation that arose in captivity.
What this rests on
Established by breeders through repeated crosses and recorded in community documentation, not by published genetics. That is how almost all morph inheritance is known — and it is worth saying rather than presenting it as laboratory fact.
What happens if you breed it
Every pairing involving Melanistic, worked out gene by gene — including what the clutch can be and anything documented about the animals it produces.