Want to get into making Pieds, but I have questions...

Recessives kind of buck the system in my opinion. You have to tailor it to your personal goals. If you want to make a bunch of codom hets, get a male visual and female codom hets. But if you want to hit that recessive combo sooner, it's better to have the female as the more "valuable" part of the equation to breed back the male offspring. The downfall is that females can only breed 1x, whereas that male can produce multiple clutches per season, depending on his capabilities. You need to really sit down and think about your end goals, and hopefully not change your mind too much come breeding season :)

Its not really wrong, its just buissness sense.

A powerhouse male can hankey pankey many times for more "bang" of the dollar.

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Basically, I understand that everyone says "the male should be more valuable that the female"... but WHY? What is it that I'm missing in the genetic puzzle?

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Its most obvious in dominant / codominant morphs. And its most obvious when starting a breeding project.

Example 1: You breed a spinnerblast male to 3 females: pastel, pastel, and pastel.

Example 2: You breed a pastel male to 3 females: 3x spinnerblast.

in both cases you get exactly the same offspring, the same clutches. But the BPs in example 2 are easily 3 times or 4 times more expensive than those used in example 1. A female spinnerblast is worth much more than a male, and you need 3 times more of these for the same result. The effectivity of the male is tripled because it is being bred to 3 females.

But exceptions can sort of just happen. like, for example, you breed a cinnamon pied male to an albino female to start a double recessive project, and you happen to hit male regular double-hets and female cinnamon double-hets. Now it makes sense to just take it as it is and breed them, instead of frantically searching for a male double het albino pied with some codominant extra genes. The same is true when you breed codominant/dominant two-gene males to your single gene and normal females, and all the triple genes you hatch are female.

Its a rule of thumb; breeding a pastel male to a lemonblast or bee female would basically always be a mistake, but when its about recessive projects or even double recessive projects or when the odd gods just keep giving you powerhouse females and no equally powerful males the rule can go right out of the window.

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Originally Posted by Juicebox

pairing a superior male to an inferior female

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It's not superior/inferior, it's visible/het.;)

Thanks guys... I finally understand the logic behind using a "genetically superior" male. Looks like I'm on the hunt for a pair of het pied or pied females. /fingerscrossed that I can find a decent deal.

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Originally Posted by grcforce327

It's not superior/inferior, it's visible/het.;)

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This is only true in recessive discussions (like this one). If we were talking about pairing a Pinstripe male to a Lemonblast female... that is "wrong", but it's not recessive/het... it's superior/inferior. I know that superior/inferior might not be the correct terms, but they convey the meaning effectively enough to be understood.

So you kinda hit on the reasoning. The fact that it takes double or more of the time for a female to reach maturity/weight to breed is the obvious reason as to why not to breed an inferior male to her. Think about the example in Colin's article, if you had a breeder sized female morph (single, double, or whatever gene), what good would it be to breed a normal male to her? But when you flip it around it is more reasonable to breed a morph male to a female normal. The time that it takes a male to reach sexual maturity/weight is half that of a female.

Also, the reason that I would prefer the visual male to visual female is a couple reasons. So dealing with a recessive gene, in most cases the male is less expensive to the female; therefore, if you buy het females (much cheaper than visual females, plus generally in most cases you can buy multiple female het's for the cost of one visual female morph) you can later pick up a visual male and then put him to your 1 or more het females for a solid chance of multiple visuals in the multiple clutches. I don't know if I explained this well enough; however, when reading Colin's article it made perfect sense to breed a superior genetic male to inferior genetic females.