Reptile & Amphibian Forums

There is an interesting thread going on right now on another site and I would like to pose the same questions on this site in order to see some additional opinions. If you have two hypo boas which you know are not supers and you breed them together what do you get?:

1. All hypo boas of which some will be super hypos

or

2. 25% super hypos, 50% hypos, 25% normals

n/p

Male has a salmon (hypo) gene paired with a normal gene.
Female has a salmon (hypo) gene paired with a normal gene.

Each baby gets one gene from each parent. Possible combinations are
1. male's salmon gene with female's salmon gene
2. male's salmon gene with female's normal gene
3. male's normal gene with female's salmon gene
4. male's normal gene with female's normal gene

Possibilities 2 and 3 can be combined. Result:
1. 1/4 (25%) homozygous salmon (super salmon)
2. 2/4 (50%) heterozygous salmon (salmon, AKA hypo)
3. 1/4 (25%) normal

Paul Hollander

Sorry for the total newbie question, but... Super? What's that designate? I've seen things like "super hypo" and "super ghost" on some ads, and I'm not sure what I'm looking at compared to a non-super. Thanks for your time!

-P
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1.0.0 Normal corn snake (Frito)
1.0.0 Creamsicle corn (Tang)
0.1.0 Ghost corn (Raynham)
1.1.0 Bay of LA rosy boas (Rivet and Cali)

Super is a slang term used to describe an animal with a Homozygous (same) pair of 'genes' for a particular trait. This means that they recieved the gene that corresponds to the trait from both their mother and their father. A super hypo would have two hypo genes, one from its mother and one from its father. In turn, it would only be able to pass on a hypo gene to all its offspring as opposed to a non super hypo which could possibly pass on a normal rather then a hypo gene. A super ghost is the same concept with the addition of the anery gene. Because the anery trait is recessive the super ghost actually has two sets of homozygous mutant genes, the hypo pair and the anery pair.
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- Jason F.

>Super is a slang term used to describe an animal with a Homozygous (same) pair of 'genes' for a particular trait.

The trait must be produced by dominant or codominant mutant genes instead of by recessive mutant genes. There is no "super albino", for example, because albino is caused by a recessive mutant.

The first codominant mutant found in boids was tiger in the reticulated python. A snake with a pair of tiger mutant genes looks much less like a normal retic than a snake with a tiger mutant paired with a normal gene looks like a normal retic. The snakes with two tiger genes had the name "super tiger" hung on them. And the term got generalized to other species and other mutant genes that showed a more or less similar pattern.

Paul Hollander

Thanks for clearing that up. Its amazing what leaving out a piece of information can do to the understanding of a concept. Thank you again for fixing that.
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- Jason F.