"The chart also says you can get a 25% chance of het spiders....and as far as I know there is only co-dom spiders, lol. Good go at it though."

Most ball python people use "het" as if it meant hidden gene carrier (recessive) or half way to some other morph (codominant). Heterozygous really means having an unmatched pair at whatever gene location you are talking about. Most (and perhaps all) spiders are heterozygous at the spider gene. They have an unmatched pair. They inherited the spider mutant version from one parent and the normal for spider from the other parent.

The chart also talks about homozygous spiders which if the spider mutation type is truly dominant then would look like all the other spiders. If spider is a dominant mutation it would make it more important to understand the difference between a heterozygous spider and a homozygous spider because they would look the same (the definition of a dominant mutation) but produce different spider offspring distributions. However, I've not yet heard proof that homozygous spiders are viable so we can't yet rule out that spider is co-dominant and homozygous lethal.

But by understanding the actual definition of heterozygous you can see how it not only applies to recessive mutations but also co-dominant and dominant should we ever prove a dominant ball python mutation.

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