Reptile & Amphibian Forums

would you just get double hets or would you get normal albinos or what just a question since both snakes would technically be het for albino i am getting 1.1 het for normal albino ball pythons soon and was thinking about buying a male het for caramel albino from NERD to see what would happen
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kevin
36 pythons and boas and 4 lizards

I belive you will get all 50% hets, each snake would have a 50% chance of being het for either, or, both types albino's.

If I'm wrong I'm sure someone will post the right info, but I think thats how it would work out.

youd get....

double hets
hets
normals

Youll never know which until you breed them out.

... they aren't talking.

The general belief is that caramel and regular albino are unrelated genes and that the double het offspring would look normal.

I came up with this theory years ago that they might be alleles, different mutations of the same gene. It would explain a situation where an imported caramel looking male showed through breeding that he was apparently het for regular albino but produced some offspring that last I heard had only proven het albino and not also caramel. If they are both mutations of the same gene the double hets would have no normal copies of that gene and might look caramel like. But apparently anyone with an adult albino female has better things to breed her to than risk producing normal looking double hets if they aren't compatible.

RDR proved Caramel and Lavender albino incompatible this year. I've also heard that a breeder in Japan proved Lavender albino and regular albino incompatible. With regular albino and caramel albino being two of the earliest imported mutations I guess we can wait a few more years to find out for sure.

my money is on a bunch of 50% PDH

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red-

just outa curiosity....how can u have a het normal?
surly basic genetics says that if and wild type genes are present in a snakes genotype (in this case normal) then this is how the snakes phenotype will show itsself (i.e. snake will look normal)

can somebody explain this too me, ?
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mother to ,1 female great plains rat snake - "rockey". 1 male amel corn - "SN4". 1 female bairds rat snake - "copper". 1 female normal ball - "queenie". Pair albino striped king snakes - "tom and jenny". 1 male normal Cali. king - "wallace". 1 female rock pebbler - "fudge". 2 female roborovski hamsters - "speedy and sprite". 2 Florida Cooters - "tiny and titch". 1 male African Grey Parrot - "george". 4 cockateils, 3F, 1M, - "squeak, arnold, piere, peppy". 1 female german shepard - "roxy",

I'm not 100% sure I'm following your question so correct me if I'm wrong.

There are many many different genes. Most mutants have "normal" copies of all the appearance genes but one. If, as most assume, regular albino and caramel are two different genes then the double het will have a normal copy of both genes and would be expected to look normal.

However, if it turns out that the same gene that mutated to cause albino also had another mutation to cause caramel then we have a multiple mutant allele situation. You only get two copies of each gene, one from mom and one from dad. If caramel and albino are two different mutations of the same gene then a double het doesn't have a third copy of that common gene so there is no room for a normal copy. Unless the two mutations some how cancel each other out you would not expect a double het for mutant alleles to look normal since it doesn’t have a normal copy of that gene. Maybe it would look somewhere in-between albino and caramel (a really nice light caramel). Maybe it would be less likely to kink!

I thought that was less than clear, too. My take was that by "het for normal albino female", the original poster meant a female that was heterozygous for the original, most commonly found, albino mutant gene.

Paul Hollander