Reptile & Amphibian Forums

One post below wants to lead people to believe in dominant or co dominant genes in colubrids.To my knowledge I have not heard of one.I am talking about MORPH genes not pattern genes(striping,etc).I know when there are more than one morph/gene involved it becomes difficult to sort but is there EVIDENCE of this type of gene at all? Sorry if this post falls into the wrong forum,but it is pertinent here as well.Jeff

Well most genes are not simple recessives but I think you might have asked the question wrong assuming that you’re talking about Joey’s post about a line of co-dominant hypo coastal plains milk?

I can’t really speak to all of colubrids but as I understand it we in the hobby misuse “co-dominant” quite frequently.

Co-dominance like incomplete dominance is manifest in the heterozygous state. An example of incomplete dominance is the hypo boa. A het is hypo and an animal that is homozygous for the trait is a supper hypo.

Co-dominant however associates with ANOTHER gene to make a THIRD phenotype. I can’t think a specific reptile example but it would go like this if you bred a red morph to a yellow morph you’d get an F1 that’s orange. By contrast if both the red and yellow morphs were simple recessives, you’d get a normal phenotype that was “double het” for the two parent morphs.

In my experience, the original strain (to my knowledge only strain) of hypo coastal is somewhat of an incomplete dominant gene in that you can pick out the hets from a group of 67% possible hets with a high degree of accuracy. Het hypo coastals, generally speaking are significantly brighter than their non het siblings. I’d never sell an animal as a het that way but it sure works well for me.

Anyway, this might be what Joey was talking about but it’s nothing new. You can change the name but the beast remains the same.

Tony,I understand how people can have the arguement about the red/yellow =orange but it was more of a MORPH issue.Joes snakes arent the only ones I have seen but I just want others to definately question every such claim publicly. I think this community has developed its own standards and there just arent as many people questioning obvious anomalies anymore.As a breeder who has seen the best and the worst of this site and the people it harbors,I see fewer familiar names all the time.Origins of these morph lines are sometimes lost forever without such banter.You know why I have been avoiding posting,which may now change.I wonder if my retoric was missed,lol.Jeff