Reptile & Amphibian Forums

New to this reptiles, recieved a Tan hondorun baby real nice, was on a website 2 days ago that goes in depth on which genes one has to carry to get ex: poss het hypo 60% need to know where i can get this information from, I looked for a few hours to find it, any help needed. Thanks

poss het hypo 60% need to know where i can get this information from, I looked for a few hours to find it,

Frankly the best place to start would be a biology textbook. Read the chapter on inheritance and Mendelian genetics. With that background, THEN you can surf the web and read webpages about inheritance. The problem with just using the web is that much of what is written on web sites is information posted by people who don't know what they are talking about.

I will leave the concepts of homozygosity, heterozygosity, alleles, dominance and codominance to your reading as they are basic inheritance terms.

The 66% possible het thing however is a snake breeders thing only. It is based on the idea that you cannot identify heterozygotes for traits that have a pair of dominant and recessive alleles. Because you can't tell by looking at a snake if it is a heterozygote or not, breeders like to give the probability that the snake is a het based on the parentage of that snake. So if you mate a pair of known heterozygotes (100% het) to each other you get 25% homozygous recessive individuals (e.g. albinos) and the other 75% of the snakes are normal looking. But there is a 66% probability that any of those normal snakes is actually heterozygous.

People also frequently confuse these numbers with facts. They are probabilities only. Therefore if you breed a het to a het and get 6 normal offspring, there is a 66% probability that any baby is a het and 4 of the 6 babies "should be" hets. However, it is possible that NONE of the babies are hets as well, just as you can flip a coin 4 times in a row and get heads all four times.
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Chris Harrison