Posted by:
Rextiles
at Wed Jul 15 00:34:12 2009 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Rextiles ]
My pleasure Kenny.
While 100% hets are a cheaper means of getting into morphs, breeding het to het is no less of a headache when dealing with hatchlings. The biggest problem is the type of ratio you get with het to het pairings:
25% normal 50% het 25% morph
This of course leads to the problem of knowing which are the normals and which are the hets since the hets will be of the same phenotype as the normals. This is where the 66% het tag comes into play and also where the bigger headache comes as again, Punnett Squares are statistical probabilities and of those 75% that are non-morphs, they could be all normals, all hets, the Punnett ratio or anything in between. The only thing you can be sure of is when you hatch out a morph and even then, it's all based on probabilities. You can actually have all morphs from a het to het pairing (although highly unlikely) or you can have all WT hatchlings that might or might not be het. You just won't know until you breed them out which if you do that to the parent het, you can run into the same problem over and over until you finally produce a morph.
I've read many a thread about people thinking they got screwed on hets because they never produced that 1 in 4 morph out of years of breeding the het parents until years later when one does pop out. There's also success stories about people producing morphs out of siblings that were not known to be het for anything. So, always take the Punnett Square for being a statistical probability tool and not an axiom.
But like I said, hets are a viable and cheap alternative into getting some of these high priced morphs and more often than not, people do produce quite a few morphs out of hets. After all, that's how a lot of these double het projects are done such as the Snow project. There's a lot of people out there trying to produce them but so far, only a lucky few have hit the odds. Good luck with whichever route you choose. Hogs are a lot of fun and the morphs are just getting more and more interesting every year! ----- Troy Rexroth Rextiles

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