Reptile & Amphibian Forums

how does one go about making a morph thats new or just say albino? sory i know nothin but genetics

Knowing genetics is helpful but not mandatory.

If you have an albino and want more, mate the albino to a normal. Then mate their babies together. More albinos will eventually appear in the second generation.

If you have two types that you want to combine in one animal, mate one of each type together. Then mate their offspring. The desired type will show up eventually.

Paul Hollander

how do you start with a regular snake and end up with so much variation in its offspring?

That is a very good question. The quick and dirty answer is that there are many genes and many different ways for a gene to go wrong. And once a gene goes wrong, it can be passed on to the babies.

Unfortunately, I cannot give a better answer without going into a lot of background material that cannot go in these forums. So I am going to give you a link to a genetics home reference publication on the web named Help Me Understand Genetics. After you go over the first three entries in the Table of Contents (Cells and DNA, How Genes Work, and Mutations and Health), you will have a lot of the background.

Paul Hollander
Help Me Understand Genetics

For line Bred Traits :
First an animal is acquired that displays slightly more of a desired trait.....I'm going to use leopard geckos. So say you find a normal male and a mormal female leopard gecko that each have slightly more yellow than other geckos. You then breed the two together. Then you select the offspring that possess the most of the desired trait(more concentration of yellow) and breed them together. As each generation breeds, the offspring will tend to show more and more of the desired phenotype(visual appearance).

Of course, this works best, most efficiently and is considered more ethical to breed multiple breeding pair to increase the gene pool and take less time.

Then you have "Recessive-trait" morphs such as patternless, blizzard(leucisim), and albinism. Selective breeding cannot create recessive traits. These traits are the result of a mutation of certain genes that control a specific part of the development of the animal. Recessive traits are usually discovered randomly, there is nothing you can do to increase your probability of discovering a new recessive trait, you just need to be lucky!
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1.3.0 Leopard Geckos
0.1.0 California Kingsnake
0.1.0 Copperhead
1.1.0 Eastern Box Tutles