Reptile & Amphibian Forums

i know that a co-dominant trait, bred with a normal colored ball is a 1 in 2 chance of each color showing in the babies. correct me if im wrong.

i read that spider is a dominant trait. this would make me assume that if bred with the normal color, it would show up 100% of the time, just as the norm is dominant to recessives.

is this how it works? im confused.

I talk to someone last night because I am in the process of buying a spider right now. The way I understood it is because the spider is a dominant gene in a perfect world breeding a spider to a normal ball should give you 50% spiders and 50% normals

Correct me if i am wrong

When we say dominant, all we mean is that there is no difference between the het and homozygous versions of the morph. That does not mean that all of the offspring will have the gene. If the dom you breed is het you still have a 50-50 shot just like the co-doms and can get some normals, if it is homo then you will get 100%.
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I have Balls!

The Spider is a dominant trait. What this means is that the heterozygous and homozygous type appear the same. Noone has proven to have a homozygous spider as of yet. Therefore the grand majority of the spiders in existence are believed to be heterozygous. Therfore, a spider bred to a normal would produce 50% spiders. All of the the spiders in the litter would be Het., meaning it only carries one spider allele. Hope this helps.
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Tim and Monica Bailey
Bailey & Bailey Reptiles

why is that you think no one has homozygous spiders? Why would no one breed a male and female spider together. you would get homozygous then at least 25%, although it would be tough to tell which was the homozygous-except for by breeding it.

You would have to breed it out to prove it's Homozygous...and the only way to be sure would be breeding it to many females and having ALL the offspring be spiders.

I don't think people really bother breeding spiders to spiders because there is so much more you can do with a female spider.
Why waste a female spider trying to make a homozygous spider when you can make killer bees, spider-pied hets, spider albino hets etc.
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-Man fears the beast in the Wolf because he does not understand the beast within himself.

It's also possible that spider is a homozygous lethal mutation or that the homozygous spiders are in some way imperfect so not being publicized. Homozygous lethal mutations could still be good for crosses with other morphs or alone, people just would stop bothering to breed two of them together. It wouldn't necessarily mean there would be anything wrong with the heterozygous animals. Maybe as ball python mutations become cheaper we can get more information about such possibilities.