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I have a breedable male who was sold to my as a 66%Het for albinism. If I buy an albino female and he turns out to be a normal, what will my offspring be? I thought that I would have some albinos this way and also some 100% hets but my local pet store is telling different.

Help!

Normal X Albino = all 100% hets

If your male is a true normal then you'd get all 100% hets.

If your 66% male is really a het you'd get about half albinos and half hets.

Good luck!

Wow for once my pet store was correct! Thanks!

That's theoretically speaking...

Ryan

This person's plan is to buy an ALBINO to breed with her 66% het. So, the product of the breeding, if the 66% is really a het, is half albinos half het (approximately).

Christy

As a biologist, I again have to jump in here as I often do in these what-if genetics scenarios. Forwhatever reason, it kind of irks me when people respond the way most do (I certainly do not mean any offense, it just bothers me for some reason). You can not say that you would get half hets and half albinos...or about 50% het and about 50% albinos. This is a huge misaplication of genetic principals. You can not use punnet square percentages to make any prediction about future offspring. All you can do is say that EACH INDIVIDUAL EGG has a 50% chance of being a het and a 50% chance of being an albino. To some this may be seen as splitting hairs, but this is an important thing to understand. While it is true that over the long haul, a pairing's offspring may approach the ratios commonly stated, we have to remember that these ratios apply to each individual offspring and not a clutch or population as a whole.

Yes, this is the right way to say it!!

A Het X Albino breeding could end up with a whole mix of possibilities. Since you have a 50% chance on each egg of getting an albino it is possible that your whole clutch are albinos and it is also possible that your whole clutch are normals. Its not exactly half albinos and half normals. There is a 50% chance on each individual egg of being albino.

If you look at my original post I said "about 50% albinos, 50% het" meaning approximately.

You are of course technically correct - I had my share of genetics classes in college as well. It is a 50/50 for each egg just like it's a 50/50 for each flip of a coin. But, in general, the type of person who asks this question really tends to want to know what they might expect from a clutch so I just answered it that way.

I'll try to be good in the future, lol!

Christy

I understand, I was just backing the guy who stated this at first. No worries.

Jason

There are really two different ways to answer these types of questions:

The quick and dirty (from Christy), which is prefixed with "In general" or "Loosely speaking" is meant to give the poster of the question an idea of what he could expect in quick and simple terms. It does rely on certain past statistics. Real easy answer that leaves room for further research should the person be interested.

Then there's the "Technically speaking" reply that is designed to take consideralbly more time to explain and sometimes leaves people confused. More accurate and detailed and takes more effort to absorb.

IMHO, there is a place for both. Some are interested in details and some are not. There are limitations with both.
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Jay A. Martin

As a biologist myself, I have to disagree. While each egg does indeed have a 50/50 chance of being albino or het, the total resulting clutch population should also be approximately 50/50. In fact, that is the way geneticists determine if a trait is dominant/recessive/polygenic/sex-linked/incompletely dominant/etc...

Think of it this way, if you flip a coin you have a 50/50 chance of heads. If you flip that coin 100 times you should get approximately 50 heads. Punnet squares were originally developed to explain the percentages of offspring with given traits, so in fact they can be directly applied to prediction of offspring percentages. You might get something completely unpredictable if you only have 3 eggs, but probability is meaningless when you only consider 3 data points, you need to consider a significant sample size. So this is not a misapplication of genetics or its principles, but rather a misapplication of mathematics and probability.

You mentioned the coin flip analogy. You said that if you flipped a coin a hundred times, you'd get approximately 50 heads...now imagine this scenario. If you did flip the first fifty flips, and happened to get 50 heads (unlikely, I'll admit, but not impossible, right), then your thinking would assume the next flip has an extremely high probability of being a tails....when in fact the next flip still has an exactly 50/50 chance of being heads or tails....

Probability and odds are two different things. Each egg is completely independent from the others. Lets say you breed a het to and albino and get and 8 egg clutch. If 7 of those eggs turn out to be albino in year one, each egg in year two has a 50% chance of being an albino. Lets say that happens three years in a row...(21 albinos and 3 hets)...next year, each egg still has a 50% chance. Maybe I'm not following you....

Wow, I am glad somebody agrees with my earlier posts. I agree if you use a massive amount of data points they will eventually average a 50/50 ratio or close to it. But my snakes only lay between four and eight eggs on the average. Which is a very small amount of data points, and that is the reality. So I am not surprised to see eight pastels from twelve eggs, and I will guarantee you someone this year will have a nice clutch and not see any pastels. Its just how it works.

>>You mentioned the coin flip analogy. You said that if you flipped a coin a hundred times, you'd get approximately 50 heads...now imagine this scenario. If you did flip the first fifty flips, and happened to get 50 heads (unlikely, I'll admit, but not impossible, right), then your thinking would assume the next flip has an extremely high probability of being a tails....when in fact the next flip still has an exactly 50/50 chance of being heads or tails....

Unfortunately your odds of getting heads fifty times in a row are not unlikely, but actually 1 in a million billion (literally 1.126 x 10^15). You cannot use probability to predict a single coin flip, but you can use it to guess the *approximate* number of heads or albinos you would get. In this case, the more snakes you have the closer and closer you will get to exactly 50%. So out of 100 eggs you can estimate that about 50 will be albino. Period.

I guess my point was that it is not a misapplication of genetics or the Punnet square or even Mendelian genetics (which by the way, he actually fixed all of his data to be more perfect, if anyone remebers Mendel and his pea plants). It is a misapplication of math and probability to try to determine the outcome of one event based on a 50% chance, the more events, the more applicable probability becomes.

If the snake is a het and is bred to a homo you'd get 1/2 albino and half hets.
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Tosha

8.13.0 Ball Python (Harry and Fluffy and currently un-named)
0.2.0 Feline (Pippen and Pandora)
0.0.1 Dessert Tortoise (Pope)
7.9.5 Fish (1,2,3,4...)
0.0.1 Frog rescued from pool skimmer
0.0.2 Lizards rescued from pool skimmer

Actually, the original question involved a Het Albino X Albino...so half and half is more or less correct. You were thinking the same thing I was -- Het X Het.

Chris
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“Next time don't buy $10K worth of snakes out of the back of a van!” -- Toshamc

I hate typing a response only to find that someone else hits "POST MESSAGE" before I do. Fifty million people end up saying the same thing. I have no excuse. I type slow. And the sad thing is that I write for a living. I should hunt-and-peck a lot faster, huh?

Oh, well...

Chris =(
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“Next time don't buy $10K worth of snakes out of the back of a van!” -- Toshamc

HAHA!

I love it

Ryan

So, in the end, what we need to just breed em and wait and see what hatches. Then we can say " THEY'RE ALL ALBINO"!!!!!!!
Pardon me, I think I just slipped off the deep end LOL.

Quig

I'm still on my first cup of morning coffee at least that's my excuse!!
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Tosha

8.13.0 Ball Python (Harry and Fluffy and currently un-named)
0.2.0 Feline (Pippen and Pandora)
0.0.1 Dessert Tortoise (Pope)
7.9.5 Fish (1,2,3,4...)
0.0.1 Frog rescued from pool skimmer
0.0.2 Lizards rescued from pool skimmer

Sorry

Thinking het to het...

Ryan

I can see why it's easy to jump to thinking the female would be a het. It would be hard to justify breeding an albino female (what you think, maybe $4,000 or more at breeding size?) to a $75 66% chance het male when you could upgrade to a $125 100% het male and not risk the 33% chance of not having a shot at albinos. Heck, loan her out to an albino male and get a guarantee of a 50% clutch of albinos if that is how you work out the split (would actually have to be more than 50% to the female owner to on average work out better than buying the $125 male and keeping the het half clutch too).

It hardly ever makes since to use a less valuable male than the female in a potential pair.

Is it clear as mud yet? lol

Geez. I just wanted a reason to yell at my local pet store again....

LOL