Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have been looking through the classifieds and have not been seeing and 66percent hets for albino. When dealing with 66 is it a bad idea to put 66het male to 66het females? Should I get more then 1 female from same litter? should I forget abaout 66 het male and go with 0 het male? what would be a good price range on 66percent hets?

66% hets are animals that have a 66% chance of being hets (i.e. they also have a 33% chance of not being hets). Each of course either is or is not a het, that is just the chance that they are based on their parentage.

When a pair of hets are bred together each baby has a 50% chance of getting the albino gene from each parent (using albino as an example but applies to any gene). The combined chance of getting the albino gene from both het parents is 25%. With albino, you can't tell the hets from the normals so after the ones that hit the 25% chance of being albinos are removed the remaining normal looking babies are referred to as 66% chance hets.

The selection of hets in a clutch is just as random as any other blind selection of possible hets so getting littermates does not help your odds. There is no guarantee that the distribution of hets in a clutch will follow any perfect distribution. I think ideas to the contrary stem from misapplying the Punnett's square to the distribution of a clutch rather than the independent odds for each egg. Selling entire clutches together is also a way around the marketing quandary in cases like possible het pieds where some hets may be visible so the selection of individual possible hets is no longer blind/random as with the ideal perfect recessive morph.

as far as your other questions ...

"When dealing with 66 is it a bad idea to put 66het male to 66het females?" and "should I forget abaout 66 het male and go with 0 het male?"

Get what you can afford but consider this.

If both animals are 66% chance hets the odds of both being hets (necisary to have a shot at producing albinos) are only 44%. Now days you should be able to upgrade to a 100% male for a little more and increase your odds to 66% of both being hets.

However I sold my 100% het albino male and replaced him with a 66% het but proved both it and a 50% chance het female last year (only a 33% chance that both would turn out hets). The reason I did this is because the new 66% chance het male was also a 50% chance het Jolliff axanthic. So there are always tradeoffs to consider in addition to the odds.

I haven’t been following prices closely but suspect that the difference between a 66% and a 100% male is perhaps as little as $100 but such an upgrade on the female side would be much more expensive (the odds math doesn’t care which side you upgrade on). Another advantage of upgrading the male side to 100% is that you might want to add more possible het females later but you only really need one male.