>My first question is why would a female het piebald bp cost 5x more than a male.



The vagaries of the market baffle me, too. Possibly the price difference is due to the fact that one heterozygous male can service several heterozgyous females. This could make the demand for males lower than the demand for females.



>My second question is if I bred a het male to a normal female what might the results be.



Short answer: The expectation is that half the babies would be normal looking but heterozygous albino and half the babies would be normal, both in look and in the genes. All the babies can be lumped together under the label normal looking, 50% probability heterozygous pied.



Long answer: The heterozygous pied male has a pied mutant gene paired with a normal gene. During sex cell (sperm and egg) formation, only half the complement of genes (one from each pair) goes to each sex cell. So half of the sperm has the pied mutant gene, and the other half of the sperm has the normal gene.



The female has a pair of normal genes, so each one of her eggs gets a normal gene.



Sperm with a pied mutant gene seem to be evenly matched against sperm with the normal version of the gene. Half the time a sperm with the pied mutant gene wins the seminal sweepstakes to fuse with an egg. And half the time a sperm with the normal version of the gene wins the race. The result is that, in this cross, half the babies turn out to have two normal genes while the other half have a pied mutant gene paired with a normal gene, making them heterozygous pied.



Paul Hollander

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