Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Can a person cross a jungle pastel with a lemon pastel and get supers? I have not heared of the two being crossed. Thanks

I don't know much about pastels so can't really answer your question but it brings up another one I've been wondering about.

How would you know if two co-dominant lines are the same thing or compatible (i.e. the same or different mutations of the same gene)?

What if (I doubt it though) it turned out that lemon pastel and regular pastel are totally different mutations of different genes. It still might turn out that the combined effect would make a super looking animal. Producing something that looks like a super wouldn’t really prove much. You wouldn't know if they where the same gene until the next generation when you bred that super to a bunch of normals and produced only pastels (presumably about half regular and half lemon) confirming that the breeder was a super (no non pastel copies of a single gene responsible for both pastel and lemon pastel) However, that “super” might produced some normals showing that the regular pastel and lemon pastel are mutations of different genes and the super was just a double het and the super look was from the combined effect of the two separate mutant genes.

If they are both mutations of the same gene an even harder question would be, are they the same mutation? Maybe other genes in the lemon line make it different than regular pastel and it’s really the exact same pastel mutation. Or, perhaps it's a slightly different twist on the pastel mutation it's self (i.e. regular pastel and lemon pastel might be alleles - two DIFERENT mutations of the same gene) and the lemon appearance would for sure go with the ones that inherited the lemon pastel version of the pastel mutation.

This is going to start coming up a lot I think. What if it turns out that two copies of the platy gene cause leucistics and so does one copy of the platy gene and one copy of the phantom gene? I guess the test will be if the leucistics from the 2003 phantom platy cross produce only phantoms and patties then we'll know they are homozygous for mutation(s) of a single gene. The next question will be if they are the same mutation and that could be hard to tell as their may be a separate hypo gene in the platy line that may or may not show up independently and may or may not be linked so as to tend to be inherited together.

Fun stuff!