Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I don't really understand the whole "het" thing. I know that if you breed 2 hets you get the wild type, hets, and visual morphs but whats the deal with the double triple and quadruple hets and how are they made? Can someone give me like the basics about genetics in retics and burms or some sites that have articles about it?

I mainly deal with boas but a Het is an animal the carries a Recessive gene that is not visible so if an animal is het for albino it means it can produce albinos if bred to another het or an albino but you cant physicly see that is carries that gene. double het and triple het means it carries multiple morph genes, such as in a Snow Boa which is Anery and Albino, if an animal is Double het for snow it mean that it carries both genes to produce anerys and albinos. I'm not the best with retic morphs tho so I don't know all of them to associate it with Retics. I'm sure someone else will go more in depth for you
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0.1.0 Brazilian Rainbow Boa
1.0.0 Yellow Anaconda
1.1.0 Suriname Red Tail Boa
1.1.0 Guyana Red Tail Boa
1.0.0 Coral Sunglow Boa
0.1.0 Coral Albino Boa
0.1.0 Arabesque Het Albino Boa
0.1.0 DH Sunglow Boa
1.1.0 Red Blood Python
1.2.0 Jungle Carpet Python (females VPI Bloodline)
0.1.0 Burmese Python (Rescue)
0.1.0 Albino Retic (Lavender)
0.1.0 Avicularia Versicolor
1.0.0 Cat

>>I don't really understand the whole "het" thing. I know that if you breed 2 hets you get the wild type, hets, and visual morphs but whats the deal with the double triple and quadruple hets and how are they made? Can someone give me like the basics about genetics in retics and burms or some sites that have articles about it?

Think of het as meaning "gene carrier". Some are recessive and appear normal, while others are co-dom genes, meaning that the gene they carry has a visual effect on the appearance.

Double, tripple, or even quad hets, simply means that a particular animal is a "gene carrier" for multiple traits.

An example of a tripple het Retic would be a Tiger het Albino Stripe. This is considered a tripple het because Tiger is a co dom het form of the Super Tiger. This could be created by breeding an Albino Super Tiger to Genetic Stripe.

Few tripple and quad het Retics are available because most of the Retic traits are relatively new, and because females take so long to breed. More will be available in the future.

I am planning to produce some Tripple hets this year.
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Rob Clark

NERD's website, newenglandreptile.com, has a pretty good article on genetics under their care sheets and articles tab. It is broken down into three different articles, Intro, simple recessive genetics 101, and so on. Very iformative and helpfull if yuo are relatively new to the genetics thing. Another great site once you get the basic understanding down is geneticswizard.com. You can pu tin data pertaining to the genetics of your parent animals from one morph up to six different morphs and it will automatically calculate the odds and give you a breakdown of what the probablility of each egg will become. It can be a little confusing at first but once you figure it all out and how to decipher the readings it is a good little site. Hope this helps a little, Todd