Evans Hypo Hognoses

Evans Hypo pulls a western hognose snake away from the species' usual black-and-brown saddle pattern and into a warmer register: tan, orange, red or golden-brown standing in for the dark pigment, with just how far that goes varying a lot from one animal to the next. It's one of the western hognose's older recessive genes, and the one that pairs with Albino to produce Coral, a warmer orange-red combo rather than the near-white result Albino gives with some other lightening genes.

Appearance

An adult Evans Hypo keeps the same saddle-blotched layout as a normal hognose, but the black and brown give way to tan, orange, red or golden-brown, with belly tones running pale and often carrying a faint lavender cast rather than sharp black and white. Colour varies more with this gene than with most other hognose morphs: some animals stay a muted tan-on-tan, others come out strongly red or nearly white. It sits close enough in look to the unrelated Toffee Belly line that breeders separate the two by genetics rather than eye, since the two do not test allelic to each other.

Genetics

Evans Hypo is a simple recessive: an animal needs two copies to show any visual effect, and a single copy looks identical to a normal hognose. The catalogue's Evans Hypo family spans that spread from confirmed to suspected single-copy status: 50% Het Evans Hypo, 66% Het Evans Hypo, Het Evans Hypo, Pos Het Evans Hypo, and the fully visual Evans Hypo. Breeders increasingly treat it as a form of albinism rather than a straightforward lightening gene, which fits how it behaves next to Albino itself: paired together, the two recessives make Coral rather than a plain double dose of either gene alone. The line is credited to Richard Evans, reportedly first hatched from a wild-caught gravid female, and was originally known simply as Hypo before the hobby needed a way to tell it apart from the other hypo lines that followed.