Striped and motley are allelic (and recessive to the normal pattern), but I would NOT use the word codominant since the homozygous motley looks pretty much indistinguishable from the hertozygous motley. An Ultra (UU), ultramel (UA), and amelanistic (AA) all look different - at least as babies. Yes, the UU and UA can look the same as adults, but they have different phenotypes as babies. On the other hand, a motley and a motley het stripe look pretty much the same thing. There is a weak tendance for motleys het stripe to have a striped-motley phenotype, but this doesn't really hold true since not all striped-motleys are het stripe and not even most moptleys het striped are striped-motleys. It may be nothing more than a correlation and not a causation.
Caramel is occasionally called a codominant since MANY (not all) snakes HET caramel are extremely yellow in coloration for a "normal." Again, if it is codominant, then it is a very weak one at that. The only true, obvious, codominant seems to be the Tessera (which will be confirmed this season - and tested to see if it is codominant or dominant).
KJ
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You have some good points KJ. When talking about variations on dominance I think it is important to realize that we are just trying to categorize what effects of pigment,pattern, ect. we are visually seeing and define by phenotype untill we figure out exactly what is going on at a genomic sequence level and biochemical pathways. We always want to put things in a group of either on or off or somewhere exactly in the middle, and while some genes are that simple and do behave that way for the most part, most do not. I like to think of dominance relationships more like a twelve inch ruler where 0 would be recessive in the purest sense and 12 would be dominant, and 6 would be codominant by definition and the inbetweeners could be incomplete dominance. Since the consensus is that stripe and motley are both alleles at the same "relative" loci, but that stripe is recessive to motley in relation to each other, so perhaps if you put homozygous stripe at 0 and homozygous motley at 12 on the ruler maybe one copy motley combined with one copy stripe ends up somewhere around say 9, but not always exactly at nine but rather it's effects have a range of say 7-11. So maybe while carmel is "recessive" to wild type maybe it lands at 1 with a smaller range of 0.5-1.5. so you see a little carmel trait showing thru in a het carmel. Also with the stripe gene you also get some color change with the pattern change which could be the result of a group of gene mutations that mostly transfer togather, or that the group of effects on biochemical pathways transfer togather resulting from a single change in a single gene. Untill we spend the time and money to map it all out its mostly a guess, with a lot of gray, even then.
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Jeff Benfer
1.0 cinnamon pastel Python regius
1.1 pastel Python regius
1.1 mojave Python regius
0.3 normal Python regius
1.3 Terrapene carolina thriunguis
2.3 Terrapene carolina carolina
4.1 Kinosternon baurii
1.1 Malaclemys terrapin terrapin
2.2 double het albino and anerythristicThamnophis sirtalis parietalis
1.0 anerythristic Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis
2.3 Iowa snow Thamnophis radix
0.2 het Christmas albino Thamnophis radix
1.1 double het cherry erythristic, albino Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis
1.1 melanistic Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis
2.0 66% het snow Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis
1.1 triple heterozygous for amelanistic,carmel, and stripe Pantherophis guttatus
0.1 anerythristic motley Pantherophis guttatus
0.1 butter p.h. stripe Pantherophis guttatus
0.1 carmel stripe p.h. amel Pantherophis guttatus
0.1 amelanistic p.h. carmel,stripe Pantherophis guttatus
