Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I've been into herps for sometime now. But never really looked into genetics with pythons especially my balls. Iam just wondering and it may sound kinda dumb to you guys but I just thought I'd clarify some things about creating morphs from hets.

Say if I have a ball that's 50% het pied and I breed it with a female that's also 50% het pied do they create a homozygus or basically visible pied offspring. Or is it not possible to create visible morphs from hets.

I hope you guys understand what iam trying to say and help me understand. This will probably complete my research for understanding genetics. Not knowing this makes me feel like a rookie to herps. L0L.

Thanks for your help.

Felipe

Genes come in pairs, one from each parent.

Some genes have different versions (alleles) caused by mutations long ago and passed down from parent to offspring through generations.

Homozygous means having a matching pair of whatever gene you are talking about.

Heterozygous means having an unmatched pair of whatever gene you are talking about.

Piebald is a recessive mutation. With recessive mutations, the animal needs two copies of the mutant version (one from each parent) to show the mutations.

So, your two 50% het pieds would both have to end up being actual het pieds (25% chance of this) and if that where the case then each of their eggs would have a 25% chance of getting the pied gene from both of the parents and showing the pied mutation.

Ok so it is really is a probability thing. So if I have two parents that are 100% hets for the same thing will result in 1-4 offspring being homozygus,two being possible hets and one normal.

Correct?

The 25% probability of homozygous when breeding two hets is independent per egg. Each baby has a 1 in 4 chance of being homozygous. You might get lucky and hit on more than 1 in a four egg clutch or there might not be any. Often people misinterpret the Punnett's squares as some sort of clutch representation. Actually it's a visualization of the possibilities for each egg.