Phantom Royal Pythons for sale in the UK
The Phantom morph produces a royal python with a darker body and brighter yellow and gold tones, alongside sharper, more triangular alien heads and wide flames. Because it shares a genetic family with Mystic and Mojave, pairing it with either one can produce a blue-eyed, all-white animal rather than a plain Super Phantom.
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All Phantom royal pythons
About the Phantom gene
First produced by Ralph Davis Reptiles, Phantom is a colour and pattern gene in the royal python (ball python) hobby that is incomplete dominant. A royal python becomes warmer with yellow and gold tones when it has one copy. It also gets wide, connected flames and more triangular alien heads than a normal, set on a darker body. This gene belongs to the same Blue Eyed Leucistic family as Mojave, Lesser and Mystic. Two copies of the gene make the less common Super Phantom.
Appearance
With a yellow tone and little blushing anywhere on the body, a single-gene Phantom looks warm and bright overall. There is barely a trace of blush on the head, which is usually plain light brown. Wide flames connect across a darker, black-brown background along the body where the alien heads turn more triangular than a normal's and often shrink to a single eye-like keyhole. The tail keeps the same light blushing as the rest of the body, while the belly is white with pattern. The Super Phantom is produced by two copies. The hobby still counts it as a Blue Eyed Leucistic, even though it does not reliably turn out the stark white, blue-eyed look that some other pairings in the complex produce.
Genetics
The Phantom gene is incomplete dominant and is sometimes called co-dom in the hobby. A single copy results in a Phantom while two copies produce a Super Phantom. This gene is part of the Blue Eyed Leucistic complex. It sits at the same locus as Lesser, Butter, Mojave, Mocha, Mystic, Russo, Special, Bamboo and Daddy Gene, which are all allelic. The combo of Mojave with Phantom is known as Purple Passion. Other Phantom combinations are Karma, which is Lesser plus Phantom, and Deep Purple Passion, which is Mojave, Pastel and Phantom. Because Phantom is so close to Mystic, Morphpedia lists Suspected Mystic as an alias for an uncertain Phantom. Breeders on hobby forums still argue about whether these two are the same mutation under different names. In 2005, Ralph Davis Reptiles proved Phantom out from an African import that was bred years earlier into an unrelated project.