Super question?

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Originally Posted by loonunit

Yeah, see, butter and lesser and mojave are what's called "allelic"--a weird word that means they sit on the same gene. Every animal has two copies of each gene. But when they breed, the genetic package gets split, so that the offspring only gets one copy of that gene from each parent. It's a random split --so if dad is a butter/mojave BEL, the offspring will get EITHER the butter gene or the mojave gene. But not both, because the 2nd gene had to come from the (in this case) normal mom.

If Dad is a super butter BEL, then he's guaranteed to pass on one (but only one!) butter gene to all of his offspring.

Head hurt yet? Try this: A pewter CAN produce pewters from a normal breeding. Because pastel and cinnamon aren't allelic. The two traits sit on different genes, so there's a chance that a pewter dad CAN pass on both... or neither. So pewter x normal statistically produces 1/4 pewters, 1/4 pastels, 1/4 cinnamons, and 1/4 normals.

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Beat me to it, you wrote this as I was reading and typing out my thoughts. It's pretty simple, I don't know why I didn't make that connection before. Thanks again!

That's right--the animals that have incomplete dominance (what we call co-dominant) work the same way as animals with recessive genes, it's just that the hets have really clear 'markers', lol.
A lesser platinum is really just a het for BEL.

When you get allelic stuff, like the Russo/Mojave/Lesser/Butter complex, or the new toffee/albino complex, that things get more complicated than that. It doesn't work to think of them as different versions of the same thing, because if you have a mojave/lesser BEL you get mojaves and lessers in the clutch, not some intermediate form of lesser/mojave.

If you think it's confusing with the co-dominant allelic complexes, imagine how the Toffee project folks feel--a Toffee/Albino visual will produce het toffees and het albinos...and you can't tell them apart, since it's recessive, so they all look normal. :) It does demonstrate that allelic genes work the same way when recessive as they do when co-dominant, though.

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Originally Posted by eel588

After reading through the lesson again I had a WTF moment. :rolleyes: If I would have just thought of visual recessives as being supers and how they only have the ability to pass one out of the two genes needed to see visual when breed to a normal it would have all made sense, dur da durrr.

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:) Yeah, thinking of supers the way you think of recessives is better. So mojaves and lessers are just REALLY OBVIOUS het markers for BEL...