By Eric Burke
In the carpet python world, there is a snake that is a fantastic neon yellow. Whether you’re into carpet pythons or not, if you saw this snake at a reptile show, it would stop you in your tracks. I witnessed this at the NARBC show in Tinley Park, Il. Everybody that walked by Carpet Row stopped at John Battaglia’s table to take a look at this amazing snake. They kept saying things like, “I didn’t know that carpets could look like this.”
So the story starts when John Battaglia from Morelia trophy Club was looking to pick up a jag. John is known for having some of the most beautiful examples of snakes from the genus Morelia. After searching for the best, he could find he came across Jeff Favelle from Canada. Jeff produced a clutch of diamond jungle jags. The sire was a jungle jaguar and the dam a diamond-jungle python, and both were fairly average appearing pythons.
In the clutch, two females stood out; one stayed in Canada with Jeff, which he named the offspring from that female the neon line.
The other female went to John, and he named her Gamma; hence the resulting offspring were called the Gamma line. Since then, the line has been bred to multiple subspecies and morphs of carpet pythons to recreate that intense gamma yellow. If you follow breeders like Martin Rosemond, you can see some fantastic snakes that this line produces.
People who are new to carpets sometimes get confused by terms like diamond jungle jag and think of all of the names are different morphs. The jag is the morph, but the diamond/jungle refers to subspecies of carpets. So, Gamma is a cross of Diamond python, jungle carpet python, and a coastal carpet python (this is the jag part of the mix).
Gamma turned out to be spectacular, both in her bright, clean scales that did not fade or smudge as she aged and the quality of pythons that she produced. I remember when I first saw a Gamma line jag in person. It blew me away, and I had to work with one in my collection. My male has produced a few clutches for me and is still as lovely as he was when I first bought him.
John still has the male that sired my gamma line jag, named Gamma5, that is around 11 years old that is just as bright as it was when it was a 2-year-old.
