Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This is for the newbies that seem to be continuing the misinformation that the hypo trait in boas, in either the salmon, orange-tail, or whatever form is a co-dominant trait.

The supers can not be differentiated from the non-supers by looks alone with any certainty. The phenotypes are the same. It is dominant to the wild type, or rather a "dominant" trait.

A motley is an excellent example of a co-dominant trait, in which the super form is absolutely different from the heterozygous form phenotypically.

Pass it on......

Jesse
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"Continuing to cling to the patterns you know, inhibits your ability to discover what you don't know." - Eric Allenbaugh

I used to argue that hypomelanism was dominant, but even the big names in boas like Vin Russo, are saying that it is codominant and yes I have read Jeff's write-up on his forum. It may be difficult to pick out a super from the rest, but they definitely do have a different look. A truly dominant trait would have absolutely no difference from the heterozygous and homozygous forms and one can't say that about hypos in my opinion.

The homozygous ones can't be picked out with certainty from the heteros. I agree that the cleaner looking ones are probables, but their are still those homozygous ones that look like speckles heteros, and visa versa. We could drop names on who suports this or that, but you still cannot take a litter and divide it up with any sureity. It's dominant visually.
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I'm just the snake room janitor

Just because we can't do it doesn't mean the limitation is with the gene, it could be with people. Subtle differences aren't always easy to catch, but they exist.
Here's a curious question, since Kahl albinos have the eye marker, does that make them "hets" or does that make them co-dominant?
jb
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Jonathan Brady
"Sarcasm is angers ugly cousin" -Dr. Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson) in "Anger Management".

I've thought about that too. I haven't had an entire litter of poss hets to look at, but those who have, I'd be curious to see how accurate they are at picking them out.

I know it's difficult to feel confident on picking supers out of a litter of possibles, but when you have the three known genotypes and compare how they visually look, there is a difference. When people have litters of jungles, some jungles don't display all the jungle qualities as strongly as others so breeders will label them possibles because their eyes are unable to definitively discern them from the normals. Some individuals are just better examples of their genotypes than others.

Nature is sloppy. Using one test, a mutant gene can be a dominant (or a recessive). Using a different test, a mutant gene can be a codominant. One test is skin color. Eyes are a different test. How long does eye color indicate a het albino? A few weeks after birth? Longer? And how reliable is it? I haven't heard and don't have the animals to check for myself.

Paul Hollander

Isn't it the case of the red flower and the white flower producing the pink flower?
Aren't there varying shades of pink?
Couldn't there be more genes involved?

XXX times OOO equals

XOO, XXO, XXX, OOO
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"As hard as I've tried, just can't NOT do this"
John Crickmer

There certainly could be multiple genes at play or it could be a form of pleiotropy, where one gene causes multiple phenotypic/visual changes. Still though, that doesn't affect whether it is overall a dominant trait, codominant, or incompletely dominant.