Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Greetings All,

Does anyone know what the outcome will be? I am trying to weight out all my pairing options with a het. pink pastel hog i have.

Regards,
k

Well, possible double hets since you'd just be using a het.

Unless I am mistaken and they were proven compatible. I'm pretty sure that they aren't, though.

Thanks for the reply. i was hoping that the pink pastels and the normal albino would be compatible. Looks like i'm gonna have to find him a het. pink pastel girl.

Regards,
k

Pink Pastel and Albino are non-compatible recessive genetic types that will produce normal looking possible double hets. All the babies will be 100% het for albino since the mother is albino, but the babies should be around 50% het for Pink Pastel. There is no way to really tell which is going to be het for PPA. The outcome of breeding a het Pink Pastel to an Albino should be:
50% het Pink Pastel x het albino
50% het albino

But Punnet squares are just statistical guidelines. While all of the babies will be 100% het albino, there's no real telling how many if any are really going to be het for Pink Pastel. You could have all double hets for both genes or just het for Albino with the PPA gene being absent. The only way to prove each individual out is by breeding it to an animal that is homo for the recessive gene you are wanting to prove out.

As far as a double homo Pink Pastel/Albino animal goes, I don't think I've ever heard/read of anybody working on that kind of project but I'm sure that somebody must have by now. The only 2 Albino recessive mixes I currently know of are the Snows (Albino x Axanthic) and the Hybino (Albino x Hypo). Obviously the Snows are dramatically very different, but I can't say that I've really been impressed with the few pictures of Hybino's I've seen. But the pics of the PPA x Hypo looks very impressive.

Speaking of which, I just hatched out 2 separate clutches of 100% Het Pink Pastel's from 2 different pairings as my PPA male was ready to go as were 2 of my normal females. Unfortunately, I couldn't get him to breed with my Albino female which I was interested in trying out and my PPA female is a very fussy eater and very slow growing. Perhaps next season...
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Troy Rexroth
Rextiles

Troy, thanks for the informative reply. I really appreciate it.I may just get a het. pink pastel female in the near future. This way, i do not have to worry about bunch of possible double hets. That is a little too much for a novice like me to play with. When i am ready to buy, i'll contact you to see if you have some for sale.

Regards,
Kenny

My pleasure Kenny.

While 100% hets are a cheaper means of getting into morphs, breeding het to het is no less of a headache when dealing with hatchlings. The biggest problem is the type of ratio you get with het to het pairings:

25% normal
50% het
25% morph

This of course leads to the problem of knowing which are the normals and which are the hets since the hets will be of the same phenotype as the normals. This is where the 66% het tag comes into play and also where the bigger headache comes as again, Punnett Squares are statistical probabilities and of those 75% that are non-morphs, they could be all normals, all hets, the Punnett ratio or anything in between. The only thing you can be sure of is when you hatch out a morph and even then, it's all based on probabilities. You can actually have all morphs from a het to het pairing (although highly unlikely) or you can have all WT hatchlings that might or might not be het. You just won't know until you breed them out which if you do that to the parent het, you can run into the same problem over and over until you finally produce a morph.

I've read many a thread about people thinking they got screwed on hets because they never produced that 1 in 4 morph out of years of breeding the het parents until years later when one does pop out. There's also success stories about people producing morphs out of siblings that were not known to be het for anything. So, always take the Punnett Square for being a statistical probability tool and not an axiom.

But like I said, hets are a viable and cheap alternative into getting some of these high priced morphs and more often than not, people do produce quite a few morphs out of hets. After all, that's how a lot of these double het projects are done such as the Snow project. There's a lot of people out there trying to produce them but so far, only a lucky few have hit the odds. Good luck with whichever route you choose. Hogs are a lot of fun and the morphs are just getting more and more interesting every year!
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Troy Rexroth
Rextiles

Thanks again for your perspective.

I figure if i work with both hets, there is something to look forward to...possibly finding a pink pastel in the incubator one day. Where as breeding my het to a non het, i will have (almost) no possibility of getting a pink pastel.

Yeah, it would be great to be able to get a pink pastel and work with that right off the bat. Unfortunately, these morphs are pretty costly, especially right now. I have spent a lot (for the past 2 weeks) on a pair extreme red het albino, het pink pastel, a pair of albino, and my frags for reef tanks...that's another addiction all together...lol

Again, my pleasure

This is true, when you focus on hets of one phenotype, you have more of a goal with better prospects than you do working with mixed hets. And believe me when I say I know exactly how it feels about investing in the morphs. It's an expensive enough addiction until a new morph comes along and then you know that it will never really end. I've been keeping snakes for over 15 years but I didn't get hooked into the morph/breeding aspect until we got our first pair of hognose 3 years ago. That pretty much opened the flood gates. I remember when we bought our first pair of albinos which were about $800 each at the time and really worrying about paying such an exorbitant amount of money for snakes. Little did I know at that time that this was the low end of hognose morphs and that the price only increased drastically from there on. Now we have a decent collection of albinos, hypos, pink pastels, axanthics and our anaconda. Talk about hurting the wallet! But it's worth it for us whether we really make any money off of this hobby or not. They are all awesome and unique animals and just working with them is worth the cost of admission. All I hope for is that we can at least break even for the money that we've invested, that's all.
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Troy Rexroth
Rextiles