Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Do Spider balls have a super form? or do you just get a whole litter of spiders instead of 50% when you breed 2 spiders together?
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kevin
36 pythons and boas and 4 lizards

Spiders are a dominate gene so there are no supers or hets just spiders. Yes spider x spider = spiders

ABSOLUTELY AWESOME

We know that spider is some sort of dominant gene; the general public doesn't know for sure yet exactly which kind.

The vast majority and perhaps all spiders seen so far are heterozygous for the spider gene. Heterozygous just means that they have an unmatched pair of whatever gene you are talking about. Because spider is some kind of dominant gene the heterozygous spiders are not normal looking (they are the spider morph type) but because they are heterozygous they also have a 50/50 chance of passing the normal for spider gene off to each offspring.

So, when breeding normal (het) spider X normal (het) spider it works out just like any het X het breeding, each egg should have a 25% chance of getting the normal version of the spider gene from both parents and being completely normal. However, there should also be a 25% chance of getting the spider gene from both parents and being homozygous spider (the remaining 50% chance is of getting the spider gene from only 1 parent or the other and being heterozygous spider). If spider is completely dominant then the homozygous spider would in all ways be the same as the more common heterozygous spiders except that when you breed it to a normal (for spider) it would produce 100% heterozygous spider (because it has no room for a normal copy of the spider gene to give to any of its offspring). I've not yet heard anyone claim to have produced and proven a homozygous spider so it's open to speculation as to if it would be viable and if so what it would be like.

A friend of ours in florida produce a clutch of spider to normal and got 5 spiders out of 5 eggs.As far as I know he only bred it to one female, is it luck or a super spider, time will tell.Its nice to finally see someone else that actually puts thought into the super spider question. Most guys just say no. then thats it.

Its possible your friends spider was the homozygous form, more breedings will tell. It would of had to of been the offspring of a spider to spider breeding.

any history on the animal?

Yes, it would be nice to know if the FL friend's spider was from a spider X spider breeding and hence known to be a possible homozygous spider.

The odds of a het spider (i.e. normal spider, not a homozygous “super” spider) going 5 for 5 producing only spiders (the het spider kind) when bred to a normal for spider is only about 3% so it's possible but pretty lucky. Of course there have been lots of het spider X normal clutches so someone should have hit those 3% odds by now even without a homozygous spider. But once you start getting to higher numbers of only spiders the odds start supporting a homozygous pretty quick. You can never technically prove a homozygous spider beyond any doubt (i.e. it could just be a very very lucky het) but if it goes 10 for 10 producing only spiders with normals you are already up to 99.9% odds against a het spider doing that.