I'm Confused

I know a little bit about morphs and the genetics involved in them, but I was cruising Craigslist and I noticed someone selling a Het Red Axanthic BP. He mentions that Red Axanthic is a Co-Dom.

How can that be? Axanthism is a recessive trait (hence the het) how then can it be a Co-Dom?

The way I understand it is that with recessive traits an animal must possess both Alleles for the gene to express itself, an animal that does this is called Homozygous. If an animal only posses ONE of the pair then it is called Heterozygous (het).

An animal that posses a Dominant trait (such as spider) only needs ONE of the Alleles of the gene for it to express. And a Co-Dominant trait (such as a pastel) has a Super form. This means that the Dominant form only requires ONE of the Alleles for it to express, however if an animal has BOTH Alleles then the Super form (Super Pastel) is expressed.

Does that sound right? So how then can a recessive trait be a Co-Dom? :confused: :confused:

Het Red Axanthic http://www.coreywoods.com/het.shtml is indeed a Co-dom and it's super form is the Red Axanthic http://www.coreywoods.com/red.shtml which is not to be mistaken with the axanthic (recessive) http://www.worldofballpythons.com/morphs/axanthic/

The Het red Axanthic is a visual het.

Heterozygous can be used to describe recessive and co-dominate states, just in co-dom the het is visual so isn't usually stated. Homozygous is visual in both recessive and co-dom.

Because the red axanthic gene and the regular axanthic gene aren't related. The black-and-white looking one is recessive. Het red axanthic is something completely different and is codominant. It'd be kind of like somebody calling a lesser a het BEL.

It's just a misleading name. For example, the original name for a pastel ball python was pastel jungle. Later on, somebody started calling ball pythons with busy patterns 'jungle' ball pythons. It got really confusing because people were never sure if a 'pastel jungle' was a combination of both genes or just a plain pastel. Some names are annoying like that.

You have your genetics absolutely right :-)

Ahhhh ok. I was thinking that the Red was related to the normal axanthic. Thanks for clearing that up.

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