Reptile & Amphibian Forums

OK, i hear that not all morphs can be breed together to produce something new. I would guess if they could, we would be seeing Albino Piebalds and so on.

The question is, how do you know if 2 morphs will work together? Or is it all about chance? Put 2 together and see what you get. breed them out for a few generations.

I am sure the big boys(and girls) have done that with a lot of them. Is there somewhere i can go to see what does not work together? Does anyone have "1st Hand" knowledge of morphs that don't work together?

Thank you very much. JAZ

Okay, here's the deal. We are talking about genetics, which
can get complicated. I'll try to keep it simple. All the
morphs will 'work' together. They just might not produce what
you expect.

Albinos, pieds, axanthics, xanthics, ghost, stripe, and
several more recessive genes will all work together. The
problem is that they take a long time (which is why they
are very expensive). A recessive trait is a recessive trait.
For example, if you breed any 2 different recessive morphs
together, you will produce normal looking babies that are
100% het for BOTH genes (assuming both animals were displaying
the morphs to begin with). Breed a male and female that are
100% het for both genes, and you have a 1 in 16 chance of
getting an animal that displays both morphs. The snow ball
is the best example of this.

Rest assured, right now there are people working on albino pieds
and axanthic pieds and ghost pieds and albino stripes, and the
list goes on and on...

Note: Don't be confused by a different scenario of genes
appearing to 'not work together'. For example, axanthics.
There are a few different lines of axanthics (VPI, Jolliff,
SnakeKeeper) and they are not compatible. What that means is
that if you have a Jolliff axanthic male and breed it to a
VPI axanthic female, all your babies will be NORMAL looking.
Does that mean the genes 'aren't working'. The answer is no.
The genes ARE working, but just not the way you may have
expected. All the offspring will be normal looking but 100%
double het for BOTH lines of axanthics. The genetics are
working just fine in this example.

With co-dominant genes (i.e. spiders, pastels, etc), the same
principals apply. It is just a lot easier to produce double
morph animals if a co-dom gene is involved.

I hope this helps!
Later,
ChrisS - SanJose

I always wonder about the pattern morphs and what will happen when they're combined. Like what about a striped-spider? What will the be? Or a clown-spider? Striped-clown?

Ahhhh the future....

Yeah, there seems to be endless possibilities!!!

The genetics still 'work' in a case like
a striped spider (they will carry both genes and be able to
produce furute stripes or spiders, etc). However, I have
no idea what that animal will look like!

is a genetic striped piebald. The way I imagine it, it could be all white with a brownish stripe down the back. I think it would look awesome!! So all the big breeders need to get started on this one, if they havent already.
-----
Josh
My Email

I thought spiders were proven to be dominant but not yet shown to be Co-Dom or did I miss the Super Spider somewhere ?

Just wondering

I've heard that the "Super Spider" does not appear any different from a hetero spider...if you get one, breed it to a normal, and get all Spiders then I guess you'll know. This is not first-hand experience, just something I picked up from some article somewhere or other.

Technically there could be a couple of exceptions to the expected in addition to the obvious of one morphs completely covering another (like if an animal was homozygous for both some sort of pure white recessive leucistic and striped I would expect leucistic to completely cover striped so it would only look like a leucistic, no color to show the stripe in).

One exception is if two mutations turn out to be alleles of the same gene. Say for example, it turns out that two different mutations of the same gene create both clown and piebald (just an example). When someone breeds a clown to a piebald there would be no normal copies of that gene so the babies would not be normal. They might come out clown looking or piebald looking or something in-between or totally different but not normal. Striped and Motley in corn snakes are believed to be alleles.

It is also possible that two mutations could be different mutation of different genes but the genes could be close together on the same chromosome. If for example this turned out to be the case with the green and granite mutations in Burmese pythons (again, just an example) you would get the expected normal looking double hets when breeding green to granite but it would be much more difficult than 1 in 16 to produce the double recessive green labyrinth. This is because each double het has one copy of the green/labyrinth chromosome with the green gene and one copy with the labyrinth gene. The only way it can create a single copy for its offspring with both mutations is for a crossover to happen in the right direction between the two genes while it is copying that chromosome. Depending on how close together the two genes are this might be very unlikely. In Syrian hamsters, long hair and banded are on the same chromosome so it took a while to create the first long haired banded hamster and if you now started out with long hair bandeds it would take a while to separate the two mutations and breed back to short hair.

On a different subject, there is also the possibility of a sex linked gene showing up some day. Say for example, it turned out there was a type of leucistic that occurred on the Z chromosome (again, just an example). In snakes, a male's sex chromosomes are ZZ and a female's are ZW. This mutation might have a different effect on females which don't have a second Z to balance it out than in males. Maybe a male would need two copies of this gene to look leucistic but a female could look leucistic with only one. A het male might even look partially leucistic. A female leucistic would produce all het sons and normal daughters, only a male leucistic could produce all hets. There are lots of other twists to sex linked genes.

Thats a very good question. I don't know if anyone has run across incompatible morphs in ball pythons yet, mainly because they are still so new, but the chances are that there are some. There are other morphs in other species of reptiles that appear to be incompatible. For instance, nobody has produced an anerythistic/lavender corn snake.

Currently I have a couple of pairs of normal looking leopard geckos where the parents were Tremper albinos and patternless, you would THINK that they would be double hets with the ability to produce patternless albinos. However, I was talking about these a couple of nights ago with Sean and he mentioned that he heard that they were incompatible. Last night I saw the guy I bought them from and he said that it could very well be true. While there are a number of people working with them, there have been very few claims of producing any and no actual proof. I believe that with the numbers of double hets out there, and taking into account the "normal" 1 in 16 ratio for double hets to produce double homozygous, there would be many dozens of patternless albinos hatched by now, but that is quite obviously not the case.

Now, it's not that big of a deal for me. I knew that none had yet been produced when I bought them, I just took it on as an interesting project. Of course it also helps that I didn't spend thousands of dollars on them either. When I see an ad for "double het" for albino piebalds for 10's of thousands of dollars, I know that it's a gamble in every real sense of the word and you could be throwing your money away if that mix doesn't work out. However, if it DOES work out you could more then make your money back. I guess it all depends on how lucky you feel.

Mark

Sorry I got so long winded, I just find this a very interesting topic.

Have you bred many of the normal looking offspring of the double het albino patternless geckos and found all or almost all of them to be double hets themselves?

One theory is that the two genes aren't particularly closely linked on the same chromosome (if even on the same chromosome at all) but it's just a fatal combination. With this situation, you would get about the expected 1/4 albino and about the same for patternless but you just wouldn't ever seem to hatch an albino patternless.

You would also find that about 1/3 of the normal looking offspring where not het for patternless and about the same not het for albino as expected. Only about 4/9 of the normal looking babies would be double hets.

The other theory I can come up with is that if the genes are close together on the same chromosome then you might get very few normals that aren't double hets from breeding the double hets. This is because the crossover to create a completely normal copy of the albino/patternless chromosome is just as unlikely as the crossover to create a copy that has both mutations. Without this crossover there are no normal copies in the original double het pair so they can only make albinos, patternless, and double hets.

I think your best bet of figuring out if patternless and albino are a fatal combination or just closely linked will be by breeding the normal offspring of the double hets.