Quote Originally Posted by bkhuff1s View Post
That's awesome! It'd be cool to breed the 'giant' blood into other garters
I believe some subspecies of T sirtalis are bigger.
I personally have seen a wild California Red-sided that was over 4 feet long.

I don't have a problem with hybrids in captivity, but size is often not a simple gene, so crossing giant garters with other species may not have the effect you are looking for in first few generations. As hybrids get farther from first few generations, the greater the odds of something called outcross depression, where the line has incompatible homozygous gene pairs that result in problems.

Single genes are easier to borrow via hybrids, by crossing the F1 hybrid lines back to one parent species you reduce the number of some homozygous pairs belonging to the species you are borrowing the gene from (though your goal is to get the borrowed gene as homozygous), but for complex traits like size that is much harder to do because many homozygous pairs are needed.

-=-
I would love to see this species in the wild someday.