If the store had no idea what it meant I would worry that they might not be right about what they have. But if you believe that the father was a 100% het pied then that makes these females 50% chance het pieds. However, there is some evidence that some het pieds can be detected on sight based on having a 3 scale wide white belly with thick dark stripes at the edges of the belly. Perhaps the producer kept the girls with that marking and only sold the more normal looking ones to the pet store. If there is anything to the marker (and I believe there is) then the chance of the ones without it being hets after the ones with it are picked out is lower than 50%.



Your pastel is heterozygous for the pastel gene (has one normal copy of the pastel gene and one pastel mutant copy).



The square for breeding a pastel to a het pied would be like any cross between hets of two different genes (proven different genes by pastel pieds produced already). The babies would have an independent (assuming pastel and pied probably not linked on a common chromosome, again from the production of pastel pieds already) 50% chance of being het piebald and a 50% chance of being pastel. The combined chance of being both would be 25%. However, a pastel het pied might be more likely to display signs of carrying the pied gene than a non pastel het pied (pastel has been reported to make some odd looking double hets when combined with some “recessive” genes) so you might be able to pick any pastel het pied out of the pastel half of the clutch (if you are luck and one is there to find).

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