Posted by:
Paul Hollander
at Fri Sep 8 10:39:39 2006 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Paul Hollander ]
>Super is a slang term used to describe an animal with a Homozygous (same) pair of 'genes' for a particular trait.
The trait must be produced by dominant or codominant mutant genes instead of by recessive mutant genes. There is no "super albino", for example, because albino is caused by a recessive mutant.
The first codominant mutant found in boids was tiger in the reticulated python. A snake with a pair of tiger mutant genes looks much less like a normal retic than a snake with a tiger mutant paired with a normal gene looks like a normal retic. The snakes with two tiger genes had the name "super tiger" hung on them. And the term got generalized to other species and other mutant genes that showed a more or less similar pattern.
Paul Hollander
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