So scaleless, a true Co-Dom morph?

[snakesRkewl]

I think people will destroy your attempts with pictures of 100% het clowns that dont show the markers, but you can try, have at it

Not a chance.

[MootWorm]

I think the issue lies in the fact that most people only grasp basic Mendelian genetics... And some (most) times, inheritance doesn't fit neatly into simple categories. Just my .02

[OhhWatALoser]

I think the issue lies in the fact that most people only grasp basic Mendelian genetics... And some (most) times, inheritance doesn't fit neatly into simple categories. Just my .02

It fits neater than you may think, I mean the definitions don't leave much gray area. Just once we assign a label to something the group doesn't like to change it. I'm 100% with jerry saying het clown can be picked out. But back when clowns first came around the "markers" I guess you could call them, weren't noticed and got labeled recessive. I would be comfortable saying I could pick out het clowns out of pos het clutch. But putting into words what I am looking for is difficult I guess i'd say it's the color and the sharpness of the pattern, Jerry might know some other visual cues and for someone else to take those words and apply them is also difficult. So we just leave it at why rock the boat and just say it's a recessive with markers, which is kinda like admitting it's inc-dom anyways lol. but it really isn't classified correctly.

Jerry I just also want to clarify since we do get into this occasionally, when I say dominant or recessive, I mean the actual standard biology definition most of the time. Whether or not this hobby actually classified these gene correctly or even in a way that makes sense is completely up for debate and I think you know you and me will agree they are not a lot of the time.

I just made this thread thinking it was kinda interesting how we had an actual co-dom gene and not inc-dom.

[paulh]

i will attempt to avoid the confusion and stick to the most basic that we all agree on, hoping to clear things up.

we look at one gene. that leads to 3 different possibilities.

Number one: the animal does not have the gene. instead it has two copies of "normal" where the gene would be. it looks normal, its the wild type. a normal.

Number two: the animal carries one copy of the fancy gene we are interested in. the second possibility where the gene could be is inhabited by just the wild type gene.

Number three: the animal carries two copies of the fancy gene, the maximum number allowed. nowhere for a normal / wild type gene to hide on that location, its gone.

Recessive is when number two looks like number one, and only number 3 is visually different. like albino for example. number two carries one copy the gene, but it doesnt do anything visual.

Dominant is when number two looks like number 3. One copy is enough, you get the full visual, you cannot tell from looking at the appearance of the animal if it has one or two copies in it. One copy is enough to make it really REALLY different-looking from number one, the normal.

When all 3 look different, when all 3 can clearly be differentiated, you have an incomplete dominant / codominant.

i know things get fuzzy at the boundaries between those clear distinctions. (examples: is a dominant still dominant if the super-form is lethal and we dont know how it looks like out of the egg? or, desert, is it dominant while the super-form would probarbly look different, but we are barred from producing it? or, is a recessive still recessive when the hets have markers?). Apart from these difficulties, can we agree on the basics?


if yes, then i would say: scaleless is codominant / incomplete dominant because we have 3 visually distinct phenotypes: Normal, scaleless head (some scales missing on top of the head), and fully scaleless. and these appear to correspond to zero, one, or two copies of the scaleless gene being present.

I will sign on to those definitions.

As for the fuzzy areas, if the super form is lethal, then the mutant gene is codominant to the normal gene. The spider gene is a possible candidate for this classification, but we don't know for sure. The crested mutant gene in zebra finches definitely fits this classification.

A gene is recessive even when there are markers if the markers often do not appear. It's a gray area, and then we go with the best fit to the definitions, not the exact fit.

[paulh]

only a handful have been made, but so far no evidence of any full scaled hets, one of them was missing the top part of it's head. The ones I saw in person were missing 5 or more scales on the head.

Then I would prefer to wait until there are a few dozen babies from scaleless x normal matings before reaching a conclusion.