Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I was just wandering...... If it truly is a tranlucent dragon would that make the parents hets? Since translucency is a recessive gene like albanism wouldn't they need to be hets and if so how come only one dragon has shown the trait out of several clutches?
Is it possible for a recessive trait just to sporatically occur in the offspring of dragons that are not carriers of this gene? I mean the gene had to start somewhere right? Is it possible that the genetic defect was thrown just into this particular dragon?

Just bored.

Laters,
Robert Wood

When breeding hets the percentages of for each individual offspring. Just like flipping a coin, if you have 50% chance of heads and 50% chance of tails you could flip it a million times and come up heads each time (unlikely but possible).

There are likely many hets out there that carry recessive genes for different traits that the owners have no way of knowing about.
Scales - Premium Exotic Reptiles

That the gene was not passed from the parents and was a "fluke" occurence? I mean 1 out of how many? I know the odds and averages but was really more interested in if it could have been a fluke occurence.
I guess what I'm trying to say is which came first the chicken or the egg....
At any rate the dragon is beutifull. The translucent trait coupled with high end dragons of color will be awesome if they look anything like the dragon on thier site!! I just find that project exciting I suppose.

Robert Wood

Since Carmelita is Chias' sister wouldn't it be feasable that Chia would carry the trait as well? hmmm... wel I guess that would be like breeding het to het. Some of the clutch would have it and some wouldn't. 50% het.
If you look at some of hte other hatchlings though and look at the hets produced by SandfireDragon Ranch, there are alot of simialr qualities. The cloudiness really is evident in them. Just MPO.

Robert

Carmelita is Snickers' sister, Chai is the male who fathered the clutches.

Most likely one of the parents is heterozygous for translucency and the other is not. A spontaneous mutation would then have to occur in one (rather than two, since reptiles are diploid) chromosome of the offspring. This would explain why you do not see the typical 50/50 mix of traits seen with a normal het to het breeding. The other offspring would have a 50% chance of being het for translucent if this were the case (but you would have no way to tell without breeding one to another het or a full translucent).

Peter

To have a shot at translucent offspring I would think that Sundial would have to breed this one to one or more of its siblings, the odds of producing this trait (if it is genetic) are astronomical.
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Yes, I would have no way of isolating the trait without doing some linebreeding back to parents or sibling inbreeding. We are not planning on doing so.
It all depends on the type of gene that it is. My thoughts were just if someone was getting into the translucent project (ie buying some from Sandfire), they might want to toss one of these guys in and see if anything happened (it would be an unrelated bloodline). I mention on the website that I'm certainly not raising prices or anything, it is just a note of interest for anyone looking into the translucent project.
Also, we do have some others in the clutch that have an "odd" look to them. It appears that several other breeders have hatched one before as well (we had one last year too), so the trait might be easy to work with.
Dana

I do not believe that there is anything wrong with linebreeding, It is the only way to isolate desirable genetic traits that rarely show up otherwise. I suspect the fact that this may be popping up now and perhaps again soon could be due to the narrow gene pool we have working with these guys, there appears to be no record of any legal exports of beardeds from australia in many years, not even to zoos.
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