Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Multi het’s are very interesting. Especially when eggs are hatching. If we didn’t have multi het’s, we wouldn’t have some of these gorgeous color morphs.

Is it possible to remove genes? Once you get the desired color morph is it possible to produce just that one color morph?

In theory I would think that if you breed the desired morph to a completely clean, non het animal all the babies would be het for that desired morph. But, wouldn’t those hets also be possible hets for every morph you used to produce the desired morph?

In my experience you can’t take two that look alike from a multi het breeding. breed them together and not get multi hets from that pairing. How many times would you need to outcross to a clean non het before you can breed your desired morph look so that every time you breed a pair of them you will get 100% of that morph, if no other influences are introduced? I’m pretty sure that you can never remove the possible het mixture it took to make that morph. I just would like to breed two snakes and get 100% babies that resemble the parents.

I’ve been reading about genes but everything I’ve read explains how to introduce new genes for more morphs. I have yet come across anything that explains how to remove genes.

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B

when you have a het to normal of het to het breeding you will get definite and possible hets.

In all seriosness there is no difference between a het and none het animnal. As long as the lineage has been preserved. Take for example New England brooks kings. My line has not been outcrossed for over 15 years. I breed axanthic to hets so i always get normals. So anything that traces back to an original locale and phenotype is the real deal. Wether it is het or not.

The only way I see to eliminate het genes from a project is once you have the desired PHENOTYPE to test breed it to determine its GENOTYPE. If the animal proves to carry genes that you do not desire eliminate it from your breeding program.
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Darwin Rocks!

Yeah, I totally agree.
Considering that you made all the effort to reach the desired morph, It seems to be easy to determine the genotype of your linneage. And once you have this information, you can calculate how to match the animals.

Forgive me, but genotype in this case is the Total genetic capability of one individual animal. In order to find out that, you would have to breed it for a lifetime or more.

A phenotype, simply put, is the animal in your hand. The actual single expression from the mulitude of genotypic possibilities. Just One out of the thousands of possibilities.

In nature, a phenotype is the result of genotype, plus the controls of natural selection. In this case, adults are phenotypes, hatchlings are potential phenotypes(if they survive natural selection)

Anyway, this is part of how I understand those terms. Can someone shed more lite on this subject. Cheers

Hi fellow!
That´s completely ok! We´re here to discuss about these tings!

Well, it´s not wrong to say genotype about this colour and morphs characteristics, even when It´s about just some characters, not the whole thing.

Even breeding your animals for a lifetime you could end up without knowing the whole genotype. Only sequencing its genome would reveal the real thing. And I don´t know nothing about any effort to do it anywhere around the world...

"Cheers" (I liked that! hehehe)

One or two or ten clutches can not tell you whats contained within the genotype of a single female. So it was very misleading to say, "after a clutch, you will know the genotype" which is what he said. That is totally wrong.

Even a single clutch cannot tell you if a female is het for something when bred to another het. That type of pairing only indicates about 25% chance of a particular character being expressed.

Again back to the original conversation, expressing possible hets would be very very uncertain. There is only a 25% chance.

The reality is, what is actually expressed can be much higher or much much lower. Those are merely percentages over large numbers.

Aside from that, over the decades, I have seen het females consistantly produce much higher results then 25% and on the otherhand, het females produce much much lower percentages. And his is over their lifetime(15 plus years of multiclutching)

So to make clear statements of what you will see with het pairings is misleading and naive. Cheers

Nature has a way of Reverting back to normal wild form if given the chance (with the same geographic variant)
Take guppies for example the beautiful giant tail and fin males are slower than normal short tailed ,resulting in copulation with the faster one.
As with snakes. morphes are a detriment in nature for survival and sometimes thought that morphes are a deformity possibly resulting in other genetic health problems possibly being the cause of rarity of such animals...

Which came first the snake or the egg????

But takes time. Because hets are recessive, you may not be able to tell what is het for what. So about the only reasonable approach is to line breed for your desired trait.

To line breed means to keep and breed animals that express the desired trait your looking for.

If you keep that up, the desired trait becomes homozygous and the het genes disappear. It can take several generations, the question is how many.

Of course, you may encounter problems like traits linking to other traits. This can be problematic. But I would not worry about it until you encounter it.

Your right that most of the morphs in the hobbyist trade are not strains, that is, they do not reproduce offspring in line with the parents. Have patience and get lucky, cheers

First I have to point out the obvious, you didnt understand what you read on genetics so half of these responses(or more)likely wont be understood. So I first suggest you reread what you read and maybe look into some of the books on kings and read their genetics sections. There are ALOT of decent books on genetics out there now.
Next, you havent bred before. Understanding the work that has gone into putting the genes(even poss hets)has taken GENERATIONS of time and effort. In reality even if you wanted to produce say...only albinos and not snows....by the time you put in the work the variety is ultimately what keeps most of us interested in the hobby in the long run. It is easier to move your babies if you have a variety...
When you breed you usually use the same male to multiple females, so you can have X times the number of babies of that trait you are looking for AND from different bloodlines(50%). Finally, when you do get all these babies you are likely to try and swap out babies with someone else with similar collections and you then have this additional way of adding to or complimenting your own production while(again)continuing to outcross bloodlines.
So if you bred 1 male with 2 females you have maybe 1 in 4 that are the desired morph. Trade the ones you dont want out and now you have 1 in 2. And regardless of what you think,what you want NOW will be different than what you want 3 years down the line...trust me.
That said, to answer the original question(now that I have beat you up enough,lol). Lets say you decide to breed albinos from triple x triple parents. 1/8 of these should be albinos(8/64 from the f1)....each 2/3 poss het for the other genes. Breed this f2 back together and you cut those odds in half for the poss hets. Dont know what I am talking about, refer to paragraph 1. Good luck!