Diffused Corn Snakes
A diffused corn snake has a clean white belly with no checkers, and its side pattern blurs into the ground colour as it grows. Low-expression animals can keep normal sides, so check the belly before you trust a label, and remember a diffused snake is not a Bloodred without the red breeding on top.
About the Diffused gene
The Bloodred line is built on Diffused, which is a pattern gene. This gene clears the checkers off the belly and blurs the side pattern of a corn snake into the ground colour. It appears in a long list of combinations such as Fire and Pewter.
Appearance
The side pattern appears blurred or smudged, and the saddles fade as they move down the flanks. While low-expression animals can keep an ordinary side pattern, the belly provides a surer check because a diffused belly is white with no checkers. Some tiny black specks might show, and the centre of each belly scale is often translucent, with red or orange bleeding in from the sides. The tail follows the body and often has colour bleeding onto its underside.
Hatchlings look very different from adults, with dark brown or burgundy saddles on a tan or grey ground. As they grow they colour up into oranges and dark reds, and the side diffusion becomes more obvious with age. Thin and black saddle borders can be lost entirely in the most heavily diffused adults, leaving little pattern along the back. Some show two faint dark lines running the length of the body. Almost every diffused corn also carries masque, which gives the bald-looking, reduced head. The head pattern starts mostly grey and fills in with orange or red. The eyes tend to match the saddles with a black pupil and red, orange or brownish around it.
Genetics
Because Diffused is recessive, a Het Diffused, 50% Het Diffused, 66% Het Diffused or Pos Het Diffused looks like a normal corn snake. It belongs to no allelic complex. For a long time the hobby used Bloodred as another name for it. However, Bloodred is properly a selectively bred line consisting of diffused plus masque plus red enhancement, usually red factor. A snake that is diffused is not automatically a Bloodred. Pied Sided appears to be linked to diffused. Combinations that are named include Fire (with amelanistic), Pewter (with charcoal), Plasma (with lavender), Granite or Pepper (with anerythristic), Avalanche (with amelanistic and anerythristic), Whiteout (with amelanistic and charcoal) and Diffused Ice (with anerythristic and lava). This gene traces back to wild corn snakes that Eddie Leach collected in northeastern Florida in the 1970s.