There really just isn't much public information available on what is going on with spider but hopefully enough breedings will be done this year by breeders who tend to post results that we can start to sort the possibilities out.

It seems to me that it might have been as long as two hatching seasons ago that NERD posted that they had done "enough" spider X spider breedings to be confident that there wasn't a visibly different homozygous spider. Just by odds, about 1/4 of the clutch from breeding a pair of the heterozygous spiders we are used to seeing together should be homozygous spider. If the spider mutation is completely dominant then these homozygous spiders would have the same spider phenotype (appearance) as the heterozygous spiders but when you bred homozygous spider X normal you would get 100% heterozygous spiders.

The assumption seems to be that if a visibly different looking homozygous spider hasn't been seen in all the spider X spider breedings so far then it must be because they look just like the regular heterozygous spiders (i.e. spider is completely dominant). However, until a homozygous spider is confirmed by producing only spiders in a lot of breedings (preferably to normals for spider) then we really don't know for sure.

Last summer there where two public (i.e. posted) cases of relatively small breeders who had potential homozygous spiders that produced initial clutches of all spiders but then produced some normals in later clutches showing that they weren’t homozygous spiders after all (assuming pathogenesis and sperm storage aren't a much bigger problem than we expect). Public information on how many potential homozygous spiders have been bred is hard to come by. There are even rumors that someone has a proven homozygous spider but for some reason doesn't want to come public with it.

Without solid information on the breeding results of potential homozygous spiders I can't really weigh which theory is more likely - that spider is completely dominant or that it's a homozygous lethal gene and no homozygous spiders will ever be produced. If it is homozygous lethal, it doesn't necessarily mean anything bad about the heterozygous spiders we have seen so far which by all accounts tend to grow quickly and breed early. It only means that if a homozygous spider isn't possible we will eventually give up trying to produce one and not bother breeding spider X spider, only spider X other morphs/normals.

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