Explain "supers" to me plz

[blackcrystal22]

Um, not quite. First of all, I think it depends on the species of flower, so for all I know, that would be true for some species.

However, red/white/pink flowers are an example frequently used in biology text books to illustrate incomplete dominant traits. Red and white are incompletely dominant to each other, so if you breed them together, you get pink. If red and white were co-dominant, you'd get flowers with red and white spots instead of pink. If red was dominant and white was recessive, you'd get all red, which would be het for white, but you couldn't tell by looking at them. And if white was dominant to red, you'd get all white flowers which would be het for red, but you couldn't tell by looking at them. (These examples assume that the red dominant flower and the white dominant flower were homozygous, which isn't really a safe assumption unless they've been breeding true for several generations.)

To try to put it into BP terms, first of all forget about the difference between incomplete dominant and co-dominant. They work the same as far as breeding goes, so it doesn't matter that much. Most of the BP traits that are commonly referred to as co-dom are actually incomplete dominant traits if you wanted to be technical about it, but for the rest of this explanation I'm just going to use co-dom to keep it simple.

So, assume white is the "normal" or "wild" type. One day, someone sees a pink flower. They get all excited. Cool! New morph! They breed it to a white/normal flower. They get (approximately) 50% pink and 50% white offspring. At this point, the pink morph could be dominant, and the individual pink flower that was found was heterozygous, OR the pink morphs could be co-dom. You can't be sure at this point.

Eventually, they breed a pink to a pink. They get (approximately) 50% pink, 25% white, and 25% red. They got a super, yay! And that proves that the trait is co-dom.

So, yes, supers come from co-dom traits. Dominant and recessive traits are either "on" or "off", but co-dom traits have a "halfway on" possibility, and the "fully on" expression is called the super.

That was a great and clear explanation! Thank you!

[kc261]

we have passed laymens terms

Haha! I know. Sorry, I can get carried away because I actually really enjoy genetics.

But also, I've found that when people try to understand genetics on a layman's level, they end up not truly understanding and then they will end up being disappointed when they don't get the results they expected from their breeding. Or worse, they'll be like the person who was selling a "het pastel" at a show I was at a few weeks ago, who apparently honestly believed that was an accurate way to label the snake since its father was a pastel.

[butters!]

lol to het pastel

[blackcrystal22]

Haha! I know. Sorry, I can get carried away because I actually really enjoy genetics.

But also, I've found that when people try to understand genetics on a layman's level, they end up not truly understanding and then they will end up being disappointed when they don't get the results they expected from their breeding. Or worse, they'll be like the person who was selling a "het pastel" at a show I was at a few weeks ago, who apparently honestly believed that was an accurate way to label the snake since its father was a pastel.

GUYZ I has like 6 het spiders! Who wants one!?

[crystal]

we have passed laymens terms

well now i know that everything i know about bp genetics is wrong.

i got the dumbs.

or maybe i should just stop pointing and going "ooh that ones pretty can i has it?"

[Mochelem]

Thanks for the replies all, I understand about breeding 2 pastels together and you have a chance of getting a super pastel, what Im wanting to know is how do I breed a black ball? In the book it says its a super cinnamon pastel, but it also says that super cinnamon pastels can be brown, silver or black patternless...

[PythonChick]

The 'black' ball you are referring to is indeed the Super form of the Cinnamon Pastel morph. Just to make sure you understand, Cinnamon Pastel is a morph that does not actually have any Pastel in it. I usually just call them Cinnamons myself to avoid the confusion there. Anyway, if you breed a Cinnamon to a Cinnamon then theoretically each egg has a 25% chance of being a normal, a 50% chance of being a cinnamon, and a 25% chance of being a super cinnamon. As you have already pointed out, however, I do not think it is possible to tell whether the super you produce will be solid brown or solid black. My guess would be that a black pastel (which is essentially the name for another mutation that looks a lot like the Cinnamon and functions like the cinnamon in terms of breeding for most morphs) would make a darker (and therefore closer to black) super. Hope this helps, and I hope I got all my info right.

[Mochelem]

The 'black' ball you are referring to is indeed the Super form of the Cinnamon Pastel morph. Just to make sure you understand, Cinnamon Pastel is a morph that does not actually have any Pastel in it. I usually just call them Cinnamons myself to avoid the confusion there. Anyway, if you breed a Cinnamon to a Cinnamon then theoretically each egg has a 25% chance of being a normal, a 50% chance of being a cinnamon, and a 25% chance of being a super cinnamon. As you have already pointed out, however, I do not think it is possible to tell whether the super you produce will be solid brown or solid black. My guess would be that a black pastel (which is essentially the name for another mutation that looks a lot like the Cinnamon and functions like the cinnamon in terms of breeding for most morphs) would make a darker (and therefore closer to black) super. Hope this helps, and I hope I got all my info right.

Yes that helps a lot, when I read that in the book I thought it was a super of a combo morph pastel and cinnamon, I had never heard cinnamons called pastel cinnamons before. Thats where my confusion was, I was thinking I had to breed pastels with cinnamons then breed the combo's together to get the super...

[RandyRemington]

For some reason snake people tend to only use the genotype terms "heterozygous" and "homozygous" for recessive morphs but they actually apply for any mutation type. Breaking everything down to genotype has an advantage in that the same inheritance rules apply for all. You can then use the mutation type to figure out how the different inherited genotypes look relative to each other.

A pastel is heterozygous for the pastel mutation. “Heterozygous” means having an unmatched pair of whatever gene you are talking about. A pastel has one pastel mutant version and one normal for pastel version at the pastel gene location. Because pastel is not a recessive mutation the hets don't look normal but they are still heterozygous even though hardly anyone in ball pythons calls them that.

If you breed two pastels together the inheritance breakdown is just like any het X het breeding. Each egg has a 25% chance of being homozygous pastel (we call that phenotype super pastel), a 50% chance of being het pastel (regular pastel), and a 25% chance of being normal. It works exactly the same for breeding a pair of het albinos except that you can't tell the 50% chance hets from the 25% chance normals so lump them all together as 66% chance hets.

So, when you hear super think homozygous. That will also help you remember what happens when you breed super X normal. Just like homozygous albino X normal produces 100% het albinos a super pastel (homozygous) X normal produces 100% pastels (heterozygous). A homozygous animal only has one type for their two copies of that gene so will have to pass that one type on to all of their offspring unlike a het that has two types to pick from.

Super is a recently made up term so not sure if it requires that the homozygous animal looks different (more "super") than the heterozygous. The difference would only come up if we ever found a completely dominant ball python mutation. For example, if it turned out that a homozygous pinstripe is possible and it looks and acts just like the heterozygous pinstripes we have now (the visible pinstripes) then pinstripe would be proven to be a completely dominant mutation. But would you call the homozygous pinstripe a super or would you say there was no super pinstripe because the homozygous doesn't look more extreme than the regular heterozygous pinstripes?

[PythonChick]

Yea I know, it can be confusing. The Cinnamon Pastel is a base morph just like the pastel. You can see a cinnamon pastel in my avatar where, obviously, a pastel is the yellow morph. I have never heard of a cinnamon referred to as a pastel cinnamon because then you are talking about a Pewter (see my next example). But I have heard them called Cinnamon pastels a lot. If you breed a pastel to a cinnamon then you get a chance at 25% normals, 25% pastels, 25% cinnamons, and 25% Pastel Cinnamons (An animal that has one copy of the pastel gene and one copy of the cinnamon gene) Pastel Cinnamons (Not Cinnamon Pastels) are also called Pewters, and they are a gorgeous silvery snake when they are born.