Reptile & Amphibian Forums

and how they come about pertaining to snakes and morphs.

How would anyone recommend learning?

What are the possible outcomes of breeding a normal female and a male that is het ghost?

Babies will be 50% chance het for ghost!

so the offspring would be labeled as possible het ghost? and those would have to be paired with what to actually produce ghost?

>>so the offspring would be labeled as possible het ghost? and those would have to be paired with what to actually produce ghost?

Correct...50% possible het...(Which may or may not produce ghost(hypomelanistics)when bred to a ghost(or het ghost).Depending on whether or the said possibles are indeed het or not.

Here is a good place to start.
http://www.newenglandreptile.com/care.html
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Charles Glaspie

The animals are either het or their not! The 50% is just the odds of being het or not! If you bred the female 50%'s to a ghost male, you'd probably know with the first breeding if they're het or not! If you bred them back to the father, those clutches would have a possibility (if the females are het) of having a 25% chance of producing a ghost!

>How would anyone recommend learning?

The best web genetics sites I've seen are incomplete. They rapidly go downhill from there to ones that seriously mess up the mind.

Get a genetics text. The principles are the same for mice, corn, boa constrictors, etc. Schaum's Introduction to Genetics (by Elron and Stansfield) is relatively good and relatively cheap compared to other genetics texts. I like the problem oriented format.

>What are the possible outcomes of breeding a normal female and a male that is het ghost?

One gene pair -- the female has two normal genes (normal//normal) and the male has a normal gene paired with a ghost gene (normal//ghost). All sperm and eggs get one gene from this gene pair. All the female's eggs have a normal gene. Half the male's sperm has a normal gene, and the other half of the sperm cells have a ghost gene. Each fertilized egg has a 50% chance of resulting from a sperm with the normal gene and a 50% chance of resulting from a sperm with the ghost gene.

Expected result: half the babies are normal//normal and half the babies are normal//ghost. As all the babies look normal, we call them all 50% probability het ghost.

Breed these babies to either a ghost (ghost//ghost) or a het ghost (normal//ghost) to figure out which is a het ghost and which is not. A normal//normal in such a mating would produce zero ghosts. A normal//ghost would produce some ghosts in these matings.

Paul Hollander