Posted by:
kn reptiles
at Sun Aug 31 23:54:37 2003 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by kn reptiles ]
Most of you might not believe what I am about to post but I decided to posting it anyway because it will help shed some light on the true definition of the morph "carrot-tail".
A few years ago Ray Hine imported a few leopard geckos. In this shipment were 2 weird reduced pattern females.
The next year he received a male that was similar to the females in appearance in another shipment.
Believe it or not but the original carrot-tails marketed by Ray Hines were developed by breeding the original wild caught females he imported to a tangerine male.
A few of the F1 offspring were lacking pattern like the mothers and orange like the father with degrees of orange in the tail.
I believe the dominant hypo gene has something to do with the way the orange migrates down the tail in the geckos that inherit this gene. Tangerines have always had a little bit of orange color in the base of the tail but when the DH (dominant hypo) gene was introduced into the mix it shot clear down to the end of the tail on some geckos.
We are still trying to pin point what causes the varying amounts of orange in the tails. That is why the original carrot-tails were and still are marketed as 25% carrot-tails, 50% carrot-tails and so on. Even though they inherit the hypo gene the amount of orange that will be present in the tail is unpredictable.
We have also noticed that when you breed a carrot-tail to a carrot-tail the offspring are much cleaner in appearance and have more orange coloration in the tails compared to those produced using only one carrot-tail parent.
Now that is where the problem comes in once the new morph was marketed as "carrot-tails" every gecko that has a few spots of orange on the tail is now considered a carrot-tail. But in actuality the only true carrot-tails are the hypo geckos that descend from the original wild caught hypos. The name insinuated that the geckos has to have orange in the tail right. But what if the gecko is a dominant hypo with just a little orange at the base of the tail what do you call it? This is why we are marketing our geckos as "dominant hypos". This will help classify the animals that are dominant hypos but don't happen to inherit the large amounts of orange in their tails. Such as the ghost I have posted. They are descendants from the original dominant hypos being breed together. They have never been introduced to any tangerines there for they don't have orange in their tails but more of a yellow / peachy tone with shaded of gray. They are F2 offspring from the original wild caught hypos.
The dominant hypo tangerines I have posted on the tangerine page are of course carrot-tails produced by breeding a dominant hypo to a few very nice orange colored animals.
When breeding a dominant hypo to say a normal each offspring produced has a 50% chance to inherit the dominant hypo gene. They will be pale yellow in color and lacking pattern with in the first few weeks after hatching.
The color of the gecko depends on what the hypo is breed to. If you breed it to a hypo tangerine the tangerine parent will pass on some of its color and the geckos that are hypos will have varying degrees of yellow/orange coloration. Currently we and many other breeders are trying to intensify the amount of orange in the body of the geckos as many carrot-tails have a yellowish color to their bodies. Hypo tangerines are proving to be a large factor in this achievement.
Who know what this new gene will do to the other recessive & line breed traits.
We don't claim to know everything about this gene. This is just the information we have compiled from talking to Ray, other breeders working with this line and breeding our geckos.
We hope to learn even more about this new gene as time goes on!
Thanks for listening.
Nicole Elliser
K&N Reptiles
(504)436-HERP (4377)
www.knreptiles.com
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RE: Carrottail... - kn reptiles, Sun Aug 31 23:54:37 2003