Vanilla Royal Pythons for sale in the UK

The Vanilla gene is quiet when it stands alone. For years, a single-gene royal python (ball python) was seen as little more than a highlighter, looking like a normal and even closer to a Fire. This gene found its own identity in combinations, most of all with Fire, where the pair produce the Vanilla Cream.

Appearance

A Vanilla looks brighter and has a white belly and Fire-style head stamp. This head stamp is more prominent and lighter than a normal's. These three circles are usually set close together and keepers compare them to an upside-down Mickey Mouse head. The alien heads down the sides are usually clean without dark eyes inside them. Only slight blushing through the black pattern is shown by young animals, but it becomes more obvious and brighter with age. It can be hard to tell apart a Fire and a single-gene Vanilla by eye.

Colours are softened and lightened across the body of a Super Vanilla, which is golden and brighter. It is not the white, black-eyed snake that two Fires produce.

Genetics

Vanilla is an incomplete dominant gene, which most keepers still call "co-dom", and the visible super proves this. This family includes Vanilla and Super Vanilla, with the super first produced by Gulf Coast Reptiles in 2002. Vanilla is part of the Fire complex, also listed as the Black-Eyed Leucistic complex. It sits alongside Fire, Flame, Lemonback, Sulfur and Disco, even though its own super is not a leucistic. You get Vanilla Cream when you breed Vanilla with Fire, and Vanilla with Flame produces the Amoretti. The gene is also called Thunder.

FNR Vanilla and Super FNR Vanilla are a separate gene. This Freek Nuyt line came from an African import. It looks almost the same as a single-gene Vanilla, but his breeding results put it outside the Fire complex with a different super.

Chris McQuade of Gulf Coast Reptiles proved Vanilla.