Pink Pastel Albino Hognoses

Pink Pastel Albino strips the normal black and brown patterning off a western hognose (Heterodon nasicus) and replaces it with pink and cream, the recessive base behind a small family of paler combination morphs. Keepers buy it for the colour: a hognose that reads pink rather than sandy is unusual enough to stand out in the trade, and the gene has stayed in circulation since some of the earliest years of hognose morph breeding despite the health problems that have long dogged the line.

Appearance

A hatchling Pink Pastel Albino is born with a reddish cast that softens into pink as it grows, and the loss of melanin leaves the eyes red, the single most reliable way to tell it from a normally patterned hognose at a glance. The saddle-blotch pattern of a normal hognose loses contrast as the animal matures, washing out toward a more uniform pink; some lines settle into a warm pink-purple, others fade further toward a pale, almost silvery grey, so two unrelated animals from the same litter can look markedly different by breeding size.

Genetics

Pink Pastel Albino is a simple recessive gene, carried in this catalogue as Pink Pastel Albino itself alongside the het lines a breeder actually trades in: Het Pink Pastel Albino, 50% Het Pink Pastel Albino, 66% Het Pink Pastel Albino and Pos Het Pink Pastel Albino. None of those hets can be told apart from a normal hognose by eye; the gene only shows once an animal carries two copies. It is a tyrosinase-positive form of albinism, biochemically distinct from the tyrosinase-negative gene the catalogue lists simply as Albino, and breeders treat the two as separate genes rather than alleles of one: pairing a Pink Pastel Albino with a standard Albino produces the double-recessive combo sold as Electric, not a plain albino. Pink Pastel Albino is among the oldest hognose morphs still in circulation, though no originator or first-produced year is documented.

Known issues

Pink Pastel Albino has pushed many breeders away from the gene: neurological signs such as star gazing, corkscrewing and a persistent wobble, and females that fail to produce viable clutches. Whether outcrossing to unrelated lines reduces the risk or the problems are simply inherent to the gene remains unsettled; a buyer pairing this morph should ask the seller which their line has shown.