Pied question

I know that the het pied "marker" is the rail road tracks on the belly. Is there anything tied to a tail stripe along with the rail road tracks?

Theres not really such thing as het markers of any kind...including het pied tracks. Ive never hear of any tail stripe identifiers as well.

I've heard of the tail stripe as a marker. But I think it was for a different het. I can't remember what it was though.

Some Het pieds do have a track markers, but it's not an accurate way to distinguish a het pied. Some normals have them too. I know my female normal has them.

I understand that normals carry these markings as well but a lot of people use them to pick out het pieds. My 100% het pied has both of these, a pastel I have also carries both of them. I was only wondering if other people with het pieds have tail stripes as well.

The belly stripes markers are what I went by to prove two 25% chance het pied girls to a 50% chance het pied male. All of them had nice markers and I ended up with 5 pieds in the two clutches.

I did notice that the dorsal patterns tended to be more intricate up front and reduced toward the tail (not exactly sure if that's the stripe you are talking about). But the belly is a much more reliable sign when seen in possible hets. Basically piebald is a recessive mutation with co-dominant tendencies (maybe fully co-dominant with the leopards).

not every het will have het markers, or be dinkers.. not every dinker will be het for something. Which makes people very skeptical to their existence. Technically speaking, het markers are not an accurate way to identify a het, and therefore irrelevant.

People want it to be cut and dry. They want a mutation to be text book recessive or 100% co-dominant. Piebald is more messy. Sure some normals have what looks something like the marker but will not prove (although I know of at least one case where a presumed normal did prove). It's also true that some 100% hets don't have the marker. But in my experience most hets do have the marker and it's very usefull when picking through possible hets. I saw it in my 50% het males and used it to pick which of thier 25% het daughters to keep and then produced pieds after two generations of outbreeding. Ignore it if you want but I've found it helpful even without being 100% accurate. Wouldn’t 90% accurate in known possible hets be something relevant?

Well. If I were to choose hets out of an actual pied clutch, I would definitely use the markers as a guide. But there's no 100% guarantee.
If I were to use the markers as a guide for some random babies, I probably wouldn't think they had any pied gene, just a nice looking belly.

I have one visual pied and two hets. One het has tracks, one does not. Both are 100%hets. The tracks are just not a reliable marker. Neither has a tail stripe.

Sure you can gamble on the tracks being a het marker, sometimes you'll hit, sometimes you won't. Just remember, even a stopped clock is right twice in a day. It all comes down to what you have invested in the hets to try and prove them out.

Gale

With 100% hets being less expensive now it doesn't often make sense to buy possible hets, markers or not. I'm just saying if you have some possible hets to pick from (either that you produced or because you are looking to buy one anyway, maybe some other morph that happens to be possible het pied) pick the one with the best markers as it greatly increases your odds since piebald is nearly co-dominant (perhaps completely co-dominant with the leopard line).

For example, in 2010 I produced a chocolate that I'm very confident will prove het pied based on her markers. I did this with a chocolate to a markered possible het pied (which later proved) and picked the chocolates with the marker. If I didn't have any knowledge of the marker I would have waited until I had a homozygous pied and been two years behind on this project. I believe many people with pied breeding results have gained confidence with the marker and use it to their advantage when picking through any possible hets they may have produced. It's dated news now as many now avoid producing possible hets altogether but a good tool to know about.