All ball python people disagree with us boa people about this subject???? I have read through all of the responses so far, and all of them pretty much agree with my theory.

I see it like this.... Lets forget about snakes for a minute, forget boas, forget balls. Lets define the word HETEROZYGOUS! I do not have a dictionary in front of me right now, but I'm sure it would say something along the lines of: "Having different alleles."

I think it is a HUGE misunderstanding in snakes that heterozygous means a normal appearing animal carrying a recessive gene. This is false because heterozygous has nothing to do with recessive genes, it has to do with Allels. An albino animals alleles would look like aa, a het albino would look like Aa. In which case, the recessive gene would be a heterozygous animal.... in THIS case.

But in other cases, such as a hypo... Lets use a Homozygous (super) HH hypo for this example. Breed that HH hypo to a normal wild type boa, NN, the babies would carry the alleles HN. Which are 2 different alleles, neither of which are recessive, but making this animal a true heterozygous hypo.

Any comments agreeing or disagreeing with this????? I'm glad this arguement came up because I am still at disagreement over this with some friends, they think recessive genes HAVE to be involved to be het

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