Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Are "true" red bulls hypo or is it a locality thing?The reason I'm asking is,A friend of mine just got an adult pr.and was told that they are hypos. Thanks!! Jeff

Hello Jeff,
A red bull and a hypo are two different things. Thats not to say that your friend didn't get a hypo red bull. I know that there aren't many of those around yet though. The hypo morph is a simple recessive gene (like amel, whiteside, axanthic, etc....). The red bull trait however is a line bred characteristic. You can't just breed a red bull to a non-red bull and expect the babies to be red like the one parent. This also means that there is no such thing as "het for red". When you cross the reds with a "normal", in the 1st generation you can expect about 10-15% of the babies to have some nice red (though not as nice as the original parent in most cases). The rest will have varying amounts of red with about 10-15% having almost no red. Now with line breeding the better red animals from successive generations, you start to improve the amount of red that shows in the entire clutch. Your percentage of babies that are red will increase and the quality of the red will increase as well. I have been playing with red and whitesides for five years now and have had 7 to 8 clutches of crossing the two. This is the pattern that I have seen and expect to see again this year. Pictured is a 1st generation animal that broke the rule about not looking as good as the red parent! She is awesome and ready to breed this coming season! I hope that this helped some. Take care and have a Merry Christmas!

Jeremy

Shade Tree Exotics