>>Just purchased this blonde suboc and another just like and wanted to know what color phase to call it?
>>Thanks,
>>Tad Fitzgerald
>>Link

I'd call it a "Blonde from Mustard parents". I will tell you this: I purchased a Mustard Blonde baby from those same adults of Randy's and WOW, that animal turned out SO nice! It was the butteryiest, yellowiest snake I've ever owned.

Here is my $0.02 on what occurs with variation in TPRSs (including Blondes, and in many other species of organisms too). The Blonde pattern is recessive. So that's taken care of, but what about the various shades of color that Blondes (and all TPRSs) can have? It's due to multiple genes acting in concert to produce the finished product that you see. This is much the same in human skin and hair color. Because of recombination and a random assortment of genes meeting in the sperm and egg, each baby inherits a different number of "color alleles". Some with the right combination come out mustardy, some more tan, others more buttery. Yes, even from two Hotdog Mustard parents, you will have some variation in there. We might call this mode of inheritance "polygenic" or 'incomplete dominance".

A famous example is breeding red flowered plants with white flowered plants and getting pink offspring (see the snapdragon flower example below). And then look what happens when you breed the pinks back to each other...you get quite a mixture. In the example, if you were to breed one of the dark red specimens with a pink flower, you'd probably get a pinkish-red intermediate. So, you can see how two similar-looking flowers (or snakes) can produce all sorts of variants. This happens all the time in herpetoculture...people find an outstanding example to breed to one of their more normal animals, hoping that the babies will be an intermediate of the two, and some of the babies might look like the fancier parent on the first (F1) generation, but that's less common. Usually the first generation are intermiediates, and that flower photo is misleading, because even the F1 pinks have some variation, though not as dramatic as in the F2 generation.



Here's a horse coat color example too:



BTW, that Mustard Blonde on page 85 was produced by Michael Murphy in '06, and I think that same pair produced another clutch this year...you may want to contact him about those, because that pair is getting up there in years. Also, I don't know Mike's sales policies, but it's customary for price to be variable with each baby, based on appearance. Best!

DR
Suboc.com

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