Hypo-melanism in Boa Constrictors is a phenotype that occurs when only one of the alleles is the hypo mutation. There seems to be some controversy over whether it is dominant or incompletely dominant. Regarding the term you forgot, I like the term incomplete dominance, but some use the term co-dominance. It can be pretty confusing since different people and different textbooks use those terms differently.

Thanks,
Ed


>>Technically it would be possible to tell if an individual were het for something IF that trait was dominant. Pretty much every trait that people breed for in morphs is recessive though so practically speaking people are correct whey they say, "no, you can't tell". In most cases where there is a dominant gene though you can't tell if it's het specifically as the same phenotype would also result from homozygosity -- you would only be able to tell that it has at least one copy of that gene. I can't think of any snake examples but there are some genes where having one copy of a dominant gene (het) results in a trait being expressed and having two copies of a gene increase that trait's intensity. I forget what the word for that is called.

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• Type of boa - jsbarnwell, Thu May 8 14:32:03 2008
• RE: Type of boa - chrish, Thu May 8 15:19:22 2008
• RE: Type of boa - DMong, Thu May 8 16:05:15 2008
• oops!, meant "imperator"! n/p - DMong, Thu May 8 16:06:32 2008
• Doug, question... - chrish, Thu May 8 16:27:31 2008
• RE: Doug, question... - DMong, Thu May 8 21:56:11 2008
• RE: Type of boa - mike1234, Thu May 8 23:24:06 2008
• Also.... - viborero, Fri May 9 08:08:05 2008
• het/homo (technically speaking...) - anuraanman, Fri May 9 10:34:14 2008
• RE: het/homo (technically speaking...) - natsamjosh, Fri May 9 13:42:19 2008
• RE: het/homo (technically speaking...) - anuraanman, Fri May 9 15:39:06 2008
• RE: het/homo (technically speaking...) - viborero, Fri May 9 16:38:30 2008
• RE: Also.... - jsbarnwell, Fri May 9 15:09:06 2008