Reptile & Amphibian Forums

would i be right in thinking that if i bred a 100% het male with a normal female, then bred the offspring togethor or with the 100% male,then theres a possibility of albinos?thanks

Yes you are right, here is how it would work. You breed your 100% male to a normal female, 50% of the offspring will be het, you will just not know which ones will be het. So you keep all the females produced and breed them back to their father, or another het, or an albino, and 50% of those females should be het for albino. Hope that helps.
Jason
Circle City Serpents

Statistically speaking, 50% of the offspring being het would be expected. This only really works though for large numbers - the greater the number, the closer to 50% you should get. When when working with small numbers, this can vary greatly. You may get no hets, you may get all hets or any variation in between.

For example, let's say we have a clutch of 5 eggs. You are looking at 2 things - sex and whether they carry the gene for albino. For each egg, there is a 50% chance of being female and 50% chance of being a het, so a 25% chance of being a het female. Using statistics, you'd get the following probabilities:

For 0 het females: 23.7%
1 het female: 39.6%
2 het females: 26.4%
3 het females: 8.8%
4 het females: 1.5%
5 het females: 0.1%

I produced four 50% chance het sisters in 2000. Two of them bred for me this year and produced small clutches (I do a terrible job of feeding). Bred to an unrelated het male (actually a 66% chance het that proved) I got two albino eggs out of one of the sisters and no albinos out of two good eggs with the other. I'll eventually try again with the one with no albinos and hopefully the two unproven sisters will finally be big enough for 2005.

So, exactly what you are proposing has been done and worked out in the real world.

I've also heard of a case that did not work out with a large number of females kept but the odds where incredibly against that happening so I'm not sure what went wrong in that case.

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