Very cool!

I would venture to guess that it is polygenics- multiple genes influencing the same trait, and the degree of expression of the trait depends on how many of the genes are expressed. Like skin color in humans. The more dark ones you inherit the darker the skin tone, the more lighter ones you inherit the lighter the tone, inherit equal number of dark and light genes means medium tone....and every shade inbetween.

I think this is what is happening with pieds. Any pied can throw any degree of white offspring. BUT higher chances of getting high whites from two high white parents and low whites from two low white parents and all permutations in between.

Someone else on the forums had what appeared to be a "het" tristripe a while back. Don't remember who it was. TSK's seems to behave as simple genetics, but it may be that their stock is carrying a lot of genes for that trait, resulting in a fuller stripe all of the time when het is bred to homozygous. But homozygous to normal passes on only some of the genes, so the "hets" have some visual "markers" that may really just be very low expression of the trait.

Just my two cents. It seems like many of the traits we see in balls are governed by simple mendelian genetics, but I think there are a few examples of incomplete dominance, polygenics, etc lingering around! Really, really cool stuff!
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Jessica Gibbs
Ball Pythons; Corn Snakes; Green Tree Python; Jungle Carpet Python; Bci; Bcl; Bco
www.supercoilconstrictors.com
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