Reptile & Amphibian Forums

well today i picked up a nice close to 5 foot male bell whitesided bull to pair up with my female ghost bull. what do you expect from this pairing? wish i had pics of him sorry about that.

Unless your whitesided bull is het for hypo you should get a full clutch of whitesided bulls 50% het for hypo.

Ian

the woman i bought him from did not stated anything about het so pretty much just a bell line whitesided. he will be bred to my female ghost. thanks.

I don't know a lot about bull snake genetics so if I'm wrong I'm totally open to correction, but from what I understand, a ghost bull is hypo and whitesided... which would lead to a clutch of Whitesided 100% het for hypo, not 50%.
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-Jaime Palma
Mad-City Constrictors

thanks for your opinion and let see who else's thought on this too.

If a ghost is whitesided and hypo (that's what I've read everywhere I've looked...), then the offspring of a ghost x whitesided clutch WILL be het hypo.

For the whitesided gene, both parents are homozygous, meaning that all offspring will be homozygous.
For the hypo gene, one parent is homozygous recessive (hypo, in the ghost), and one parent is homozygous dominant (as far as we know, the whitesided bull is not a carrier for the hypo gene). Therefore, the only genes that the ghost parent can give are hypo genes, and the only genes that the whitesided parent can give are normal genes, making each offspring 100% het hypo.

So unless I'm confused about what a ghost is (which I will admit, is a possibility), then all of the offspring would have to be 100% het hypo.
HOWEVER, I have also read that the hypo gene may be somewhat co-dominant in pits, which would lead to slightly different results. If the hypo gene IS co-dominant and the ghost is only het for hypo, then the offspring will be 50% het hypo. HOWEVER, these offspring would then be ghosts (they would be het for hypo, the same as the ghost parent) and would be distinguishable from their whitesided clutchmates, leading to a clutch 50/50 whitesided and ghost.

I study ball python and corn snake genetics for the most part, but basic punnett squares work out for most simple genetics questions such as this.
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-Jaime Palma
Mad-City Constrictors

thanks. most of this makes sense and what you were telling me makes me remember what the seller told me but i did not hear everything he said since the show was loud and being hard of hearing is hard to hear. i did hear him saying something about 100% het hypo and so on. thanks again.