Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have a normal colored female and an amel male. Both are apparently het for anery. For some reason, this year I got many fewer than the expected 1/4th anery. The first clutch was 33 eggs, 31 of which hatched, and only 2 of which are anery. The second clutch was 16 eggs, 14 of which hatched and again I got 2 anery. (I'm fairly sure one of the non-hatching eggs was normal, no way to tell on the others). Is this just luck of the draw, or is there something other than strict percentages that might effect the anery percentage?
Corinne
dragonfly@w-link.net

MURPHY!

Genetics calculators give you a percentage based on a perfect world...This world is far from perfect!

Think of it like flipping two coins. The possibility on any given coin flip that you'd get two heads is 1/4. But if you were to flip the coins 33 times, you might wind up with two heads showing up 10 times, 2 times, or even no times if you were unlucky.

In fact, the odds of you getting anery EXACTLY 1/4 of the time are pretty low. The whole point is that it's probability, not certainty.

That having been said, random chance may be only part of the reason. There could be a linked trait to one of your snakes' anery genes which cause those sperm to be less motile than the sperm carrying the normal gene (just a random hypothesis that popped into my head...). Or something totally different. If your snakes continue to produce the same ratio of anerys to normals in future years, it's likely that there's more than random probability at work. (And if that's the case, you're unlikely to be able to find the cause, let alone fix it.) But for now, just blame Murphy.

-Kat
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"You keep WHAT in your freezer?"
"Mice. And rats. If that bothers you, I can call them 'cows' instead."

...don't mind me...
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"You keep WHAT in your freezer?"
"Mice. And rats. If that bothers you, I can call them 'cows' instead."