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I was wondering if you took a lesser platty male and a female axanthic and bred them. You produced 5 eggs of which 2 were lessers and the remaining 3 were normal looking females, what would the normals be carrying genetically?

Would they be 100% het for axanthic only?
or
Would the Lesser male contribute something to them?

I know there are some discussions on the hidden gene theory with the Lessers. This is what has sparked my interest. Not to mention I am getting one of the het females.

Any thoughts and comments would be greatfully appreciated.
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Snowballs

It's not proven yet but the best theory I've seen so far (posted by Hahaman) that explains all the results seen to date including the butter platys is that the gene that turns a lesser into a platy is an allele of the platy gene. If that turns out to be the case then the lessers don't carry any hidden gene for platy (if they had the gene they would be platy). Only the "lesser sib"/normal looking offspring of a platy would carry the hidden dilute gene. Per this theory your non lesser would be het axanthic only but hey, breed them just in case, at least you will get axanthics.

s

No all the normals would be 100% het axanthic.
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RicK @ BbI

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So your saying, even though both the male and female donate 50% of the total gentic material at conception, nothing is passed on by the male lesser?
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Snowballs

I have NO clue about the lesser platty nor the platty. My response was that all the normal WOULD a least be all 100% het axanthic. Read the post to what I replied too.
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RicK @ BbI

Ball Boutique,Inc.
Proud sponsor of this forum

>>So your saying, even though both the male and female donate 50% of the total gentic material at conception, nothing is passed on by the male lesser?
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>>Snowballs
>>

Yes, something is passed on from the Lesser male to the normal looking offspring, the wild type allele is passed... If the Lesser was in dominant form, he'd only have the mutated gene to pass but since he's only co dom he will theoretically only pass the mutated gene to half of the babies while the other half will be given the wild type.. So if you had a blue eyed luecy and bred it to a normal, you'd get all lessers.
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Joe Lydon
Got Boids?

Right on about the lesser passing the normal version of the lesser gene to it's non-lesser offspring.

However, small pet peeve of mine, you are using "dominant" and co-dominant incorrectly. The blue-eyed leucistic is HOMOZYGOUS (not dominant) for the lesser gene and the lesser phenotype is HETEROZYGOUS (not co-dom) for the lesser gene. The relationship between the two phenotypes (both mutants but different from each other) makes the mutation type co-dominant. However the mutation type doesn't change between the hets (lessers) and the homozygous (blue eyed leucistic) – just the genotype changes from heterozygous to homozygous.

You are certainly not the first person to mix mutation type terms with genotypes but I think using the correct genotype terms will help people. Once they realize that a lesser is a het and a blue eyed leucistic is homozygous then it makes perfect since that lesser X normal = 50% lesser and blue eyed leucistic X normal = 100% lesser. It's just like het albino X normal = 50% chance hets and homozygous albino X normal = 100% hets but with the co-dominant lesser gene you can see the hets.