A Lesson in Basic Genetics

[paulh]

There are no codominant traits in ball pythons.

Pastel + mojave makes pastave where the two colors blend together.
If they were codominant there would be parts of the snake looking like a pastel and parts looking like a mojave.

The pastel and mojave genes are not members of the same gene complex. A pastave has two gene pairs of interest--a pastel gene paired with the corresponding normal gene and a mojave gene paired with its corresponding normal gene. Only genes of the same gene complex can be codominant/incomplete dominant. So pastave does not count.

Codominance = Parts of the snake having one appearance and parts of the snake having a different appearance. This definition is inaccurate.

The Burmese cat (c^bc^b) and the Siamese cat (c^sc^s) have different colors because the c^b and c^s genes produce different amounts of melanin. Pictures of Burmese, Siamese and Tonkinese cats can be found in Wikipedia. The Tonkinese cat (c^bc^s) is intermediate in color because each color cell has a c^b and a c^s gene and each gene does its own thing. The two genes are codominant instead of incomplete dominant to each other because each gene produces a functional gene product.

The only snake genes that I would call incomplete dominants in the strict sense are the amelanistic and hypo genes in the corn snake. Until other genes are characterized, we don't know for sure which are codominants and which are incomplete dominants. And arguing about which term to use is pointless.