I do love data to put theories to the test.
Bumblebee X normal being able to produce some Bumblebee (should be 25% chance each egg) as well as the existence of killer bee prove that spider and pastel are different mutations of DIFFERENT genes.
However I'm thinking that at least some of the white snake genes will be different mutations of the SAME gene. This multiple mutant allele situation is fairly new to snakes (striped and motley in corn snakes is the best example so far). I thought that perhaps cinnamon pastel and pastel jungle would be alleles after seeing the pewter but I was proved wrong on that last summer with the silver bullet and the like. RDR's published Lesser Phantom clutches last year where consistent with the theory that those two mutations could be alleles but we need a bigger sample size to prove it wasn't just luck that no normals where produced.
Basically the difference between a situation where two mutations turn out to be different mutant versions of the same gene and one where they are different gene locations all together is that each snake should only have at most two copies of the same gene - one from each parent. If lesser and mojave are different versions of the same gene then your lesser X mojave produced leucistics got one copy of that gene from the lesser parent and the other from the mojave parent and don't have any room for a normal copy (since they can't have three copies of the same gene). In this theory the lesser mojave leucistic doesn't have a normal version of the common white snake gene since it already has it's two copies filed with one lesser version and one mojave version. When that cross leucistic is bred it will have a 50/50 chance of giving either the lesser or the mojave version to each offspring but it can't give a normal since it doesn't have one and it can give only one and not both because that is how sexual reproduction works with higher animals (or maybe everything, I don't know). Basically it picks half of it's genes to give to each offspring and unless something goes wrong no offspring should get two copies of the same gene from one parent. Half the babies get the mojave version of that gene pair and the other half (on average) get the lesser version.
Going back to the bumblebee example spider and pastel are separate genes so each is paired with the normal version of it's respective gene in the bumblebee. So when the bumblebee breeds we are interested in two different pairs of genes. At the spider locus it either gives the spider mutant version of the normal for spider version. At the separate pastel locus it either gives the pastel mutant version of the normal for pastel version. Remember that there are many different “normal” genes so the normal for spider gene and the normal for pastel gene are at completely different locations and should be kept separate. Just looking at those two locations (spider and pastel) there are 4 total versions for the bumblebee (basically a double het spider and pastel) to pick from and it should (as long as they don't happen to be close together on the same chromosome) randomly pick one from each pair resulting in 4 different combinations that are each equally likely:
spider pastel
spider normal for pastel
normal for spider pastel
normal for spider normal for pastel
With the allele theory in the lesser mojave leucistic we would only be looking at one gene location so only 2 different versions and only two equally likely contributions to pass to the offspring:
lesser
Mojave
It is also notworthy that with the allele theory of white snakes you couldn’t have a lesser leucistic (i.e. homozygous lesser) that was also het for phantom or Mojave. This is going back to the only two versions of the same gene rule (one from each parent). If both versions of the common white snake gene where occupied by lesser versions there would not be room for any other versions of that gene (normal for white snake, phantom, Mojave, Vin Russo or whatever other versions there may end up being - perhaps butter or even dilute to make platy might be more alleles in this group).
There is a third scenario where lesser and Mojave might be different versions of different genes that just happen to be linked by being close together on the same chromosome. This is what really gets fun and might take a long time to figure out from the allele theory, especially if the loci are very close together. If they are different gene locations that just happen to normally get inherited with the normal version of the other because they are close together on the same chromosome you might eventually produce a leucistic (or a normal) from lesser mojave leucistic X normal if the right crossover happens between the two copies of the common chromosome to make a version of the chromosomes with both mutations side by side. That leucistic would then produce about 50% leucistics and 50% normals when bred to normals until another crossover happened to split the lesser and mojave mutations back apart in some later generation.
No matter what anybody says, everyone wants to make money.
lol
