As far as I know, NERD and others have mated spider x spider in an attempt to get homozygous spiders. None of the baby spiders that they got were visibly different from heterozygous spiders. The most likely explanation (IMHO) is that the homozygous and heterozygous spiders look alike. If so, then spider would be a dominant mutant gene.

Those babies must be raised up and mated to heterozygous spiders and normals. A spider that produces a normal from such a mating must be heterozygous. A spider that produces 25 spiders and no normals from matings with normals has a better than 99% chance of being a homozygous spider.

My impression is that the first possibly homozygous spiders have matured within the last year or two, and some have not matured yet. Some of the possibly homozygous spiders have been proven heterozygous, some of the possibly homozygous spiders haven't produced enough babies yet, and some people have not reported the results from their possibly homozygous spiders' breedings. So somebody may have produced a homozygous spider, but we don't know it yet.

Paul Hollander

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