Adding "one more morph": A bright future for the BP industry

I recently added a nice vanilla female to my collection, courtesy of Marc Bailey (pictures coming soon). Yes, I did have to pry it from his hands tooth and nail. :) This got me to thinking: What is the marginal gain of adding one more morph to the collection?

Throughout this discussion I won't consider "super forms", so a pastel and a super pastel are lumped together in my counting. Bumblebee and killerbee would also be the same, etc... If someone wants to tackle this one, be my guest! :)

I also won't count normals, once again for ease of discussion.

Say you have one gene (a), then you can at best produce animals with the gene (a).

Now say you have two genes (a,b), then you can produce animals with gene (a), gene (b), and genes (a) & (b).

Keep going...we could write it out like this:

(a) = {a}
(a,b) = {a, b, ab}
(a,b,c) = {a, b, c, ab, ac, bc, abc}
(a,b,c,d) = {a, b, c, d, ab, ac, ad, bc, bd, abc, abd, bcd, abcd}

etc....

The recursion is: morphs(n+1) = 2*morphs(n)+1

We can plug this into Excel to see how fast this grows:

genes / morphs
1.... 1
2.... 3
3.... 7
4.... 15
5.... 31
6.... 63
7.... 127
8.... 255
9.... 511
10... 1023
11... 2047
12... 4095
13... 8191
14... 16383
15... 32767


Adding the vanilla bumped me from 9 to 10 genes, and so increased from 511 combos to 1023. Once again none of this is accounting for super forms so these are all vast underestimates. :)

I think this is one cause of the addictiveness of ball pythons and an indicator of the future strength of the market. The marginal gain from adding one more gene to your collection is a dramatic increase in the number of combo morphs you can produce.

JonV

Very interesting, never thought of this before.

good luck on the odds for getting more than 3 base genes into a single snake ;)

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Originally Posted by mainbutter

good luck on the odds for getting more than 3 base genes into a single snake ;)

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Wait... that's possible isn't it?

What in the HELL are you talking about?

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Originally Posted by DutchHerp

Wait... that's possible isn't it?

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Quad genes are possible







The way that you have that equation set up, you account for 100% odds in your favor. To me that just seems odd......no pun intended.

I think the basis of this is right, but the process is wrong.

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Originally Posted by Mike Cavanaugh

What in the HELL are you talking about?

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replace a, b, c, d with pastel, spider, lesser, mojave, etc....

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Originally Posted by DutchHerp

Wait... that's possible isn't it?

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Yes, they are not all on the same allele. Queen bee, bumblebelly, spinner blast, etc....

JonV

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Originally Posted by DutchHerp

Wait... that's possible isn't it?

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It's possible, but takes either many generations or really good luck, and each additional gene gets less and less likely to happen.

For example..

pastel x normal: 50% chance of each egg being a pastel.

pastel x spider: 25% chance of each egg being a bee

bee x pinstripe: 12.5% chance of each egg being a spinner bee

1 in 16 chance for adding another base morph by mating it to a spinner bee. Goes up by powers of 2 if you mate heterozygous base morphs.

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Originally Posted by Patrick Long

Quad genes are possible







The way that you have that equation set up, you account for 100% odds in your favor. To me that just seems odd......no pun intended.

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I was just considering "possibilities" with these animals, with no account for the probabilities for each. I can't account for probabilities since that depends on the road you take to each combo.

JonV