My name is Miri Sydney Burnish and I started MSB Reptiles in 2015. I had started keeping and breeding ball pythons and king snakes as a start. now, I specialize in ball pythons and colubrids, while also working with boas, retics, rare colubrid species, tarantulas, lizard species, tortoises and more.
My snake keeping started with a California King Snake named Midnight that I received as a gift from my father in 3rd grade. My love for reptiles and all other animals has grown with each and every encounter. It has now blossomed into a large collection and being a part of the amazing reptile industry.
MSB Reptiles is here to continue the love and knowledge of the reptile hobby by providing excellent customer service and only the highest quality animals.
About the Monarch Gene!
I bought out Rance Meier's Monarch collection in 2019, the originator/founder of the Monarch gene. The paragraphs below are his story on how Monarch popped up!
In 1999 I (Rance) acquired a pair of very ugly pastels. Over the course of ten years, the snakes simply did not thrive. They were poor eaters, and it seemed like they would never grow. Around 2008 the pair started eating like crazy, and would breed every time I put them together. After a decade of testing my patience, the female was finally gravid. Once she laid, I was disappointed because there were only two good eggs in the clutch. After everything I had been through with these pastels, I shouldn’t have been surprised!
When the eggs hatched, I expected to find normals, pastels, or super pastels. But I did not! One baby looked like a Genetic Stripe, but very light in color, while the other had a more normal pattern. Their colors were a yellow orange, with a deep purple color, and both lacked black pigment. I was excited and confused at what I was seeing.
I now know that the parents are actually double heterozygous, het for the new gene Monarch, and also het for Genetic Stripe, both being simple recessive. The two babies ended up being a Monarch Pastel, and a Monarch Pastel Genetic Stripe.
A year and a half later, I paired the pastels again, and got a 7 egg clutch. The results were: 2 Super Pastels, 1 Genetic Stripe, 1 Pastel Genetic Stripe, 1 Super Pastel Genetic Stripe, 1 Monarch, and 1 Monarch Genetic Stripe. This clutch gave me the snake expressing the single Monarch gene.