Caramel Hognoses

Caramel is a tyrosinase-positive (T+) recessive albino gene in the western hognose snake. Where a standard T- Albino erases pigment outright, Caramel warms it: black and brown give way to cream and peach, the head and neck pattern all but disappears, and the eyes turn ruby pink. Keepers buy it for that clean, uncluttered look on an animal whose wild type is normally busy with dark saddle blotches and a heavily marked face.

Appearance

Caramel replaces the western hognose's usual black-and-brown patterning with warm cream, peach and pink tones and drops the melanin from the face almost entirely, so the head and neck carry little to none of the wild type's markings. The eyes and tongue read ruby pink rather than the dark eyes of an unaffected animal. Hatchlings often show a faint translucent stripe running the length of the belly; it fades through the first few sheds into a clean ivory-to-cream underside with almost no dark pattern left on it.

Genetics

Caramel is recessive; the catalogue carries it across five rows: Caramel itself, Het Caramel, 50% Het Caramel, 66% Het Caramel and Pos Het Caramel, the same single-gene ladder as any other recessive in the hobby. It's classed as a T+ (tyrosinase-positive) albino, a different melanin pathway from the western hognose's more familiar T- Albino gene. Stacked with the recessive Evans Hypo gene, Caramel produces Lemon Ghost, a double-recessive combo whose yellow tone deepens and whose pattern contrast fades further with every shed, the same line JMG Reptile later worked Arctic out of. One hognose genetics database treats Caramel itself as a double-recessive stack of two other genes (provisionally named Frost and Hypo) rather than a single locus, but calls that reading still under review by the hobby, and no other source corroborates it, so it's noted here rather than adopted.