Paradox

[Freakie_frog]

Think of a paradox as a set of genes or cells that didn't get the memo about what type of skin cell they were supposed to be. Funny thing is a few years ago there was a paradox albino that when bred to an albino produced hets. Come to find out the paradox was a het albino that liiked like an albino paradox.. Weird stuff huh???

[Matt K]

Haha, that's crazy. I guess it's easier to get excited about the Albino genes than normal stuff

Cheers,
-Matt

[JenH]

I've thought for a while that paradox snakes might be 'chimeras'. To get a chimera in mammals you need a set of fraternal twins (siblings with different sets of fraternal DNA), and one of them needs to absorb the other. The results can be variable, from a person or dog with two differently coloured eyes, or a male tri-coloured cat (which is a genetic impossibility unless it has 2 different sets of DNA). There was a story in the news a while back about a woman who was fighting for custody of her kids. They collected her DNA from a blood sample and compared her DNA to her children's to make sure that they were hers and she could legally have custody. It didn't match, but she was sure she was their mother. They investigated it further and discovered she was a chimera. Her ovaries belonged to a fraternal twin that she'd absorbed in the womb, so her children's DNA was inherited from the twin. Here's the story if you're interested: http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2315693 Now, I'm not sure if two different ball python morphs can be conceived in the same egg, or if they're always identical twins. That fact could make or break the theory.

I've also heard the theory that 2 sperm fertilized the egg at the same time and the 2 sets of male genes fight it out causing the paradox look. The snake would have to be bred to see what it really is.....

[Serpent_Nirvana]

I've also heard the theory that 2 sperm fertilized the egg at the same time and the 2 sets of male genes fight it out causing the paradox look. The snake would have to be bred to see what it really is.....

Mmmmnope.

Double fertilization should result in triploidy, which is generally, in vertebrates (here comes my favorite medical euphemism), "incompatible with life." Unless the two sperm fertilized the one egg, which then split into two zygotes like in this article, which then fused again to form a chimera. Which seems, to me, really pretty unlikely, given how unlikely that type of twinning is in the first place.

I like the chimera theory. Although, has a paradox ever been created from breeding recessive x recessive? ... I feel like I read that one or two had ...

[Freakie_frog]

Basicaly a paradox is an area where the morph gene doesn't fully supress the normal gene and the result is a paradox..

The cool ones are the super Paradox's.. Where you have a say white snake with big sploches of the base mutation pattern and color.

Or even better the Het albino that cropped up a few years ago that looked like a paradox albino but ended up being a het.

Photo owned by Tom Cowell - This is a Het and not an albino..Pretty cool eh??

[PythonWallace]

I hatched this BEL paradox out last year from a mojave x normal breeding, and I know of a lot of homozygous phenotype-having paradox' that are produced from clutches that should only produce heterozygous phenotypes, so most paradox' are likely to only have the breeding capability of the heterozygous mutation.

[N4S]

Paradox are ugly IMO.

They are the visually challenged BP's. lol

[JAMills]

Basicaly a paradox is an area where the morph gene doesn't fully supress the normal gene and the result is a paradox..

The cool ones are the super Paradox's.. Where you have a say white snake with big sploches of the base mutation pattern and color.

Or even better the Het albino that cropped up a few years ago that looked like a paradox albino but ended up being a het.

Photo owned by Tom Cowell - This is a Het and not an albino..Pretty cool eh??

I actually took that picture for Tom. It is a beautiful snake in person and yes it is a het not an albino.

[cinderbird]

The results can be variable, from a person or dog with two differently coloured eyes, or a male tri-coloured cat (which is a genetic impossibility unless it has 2 different sets of DNA).

male tricolor cats can have the different DNA sets, or be XXY instead of XY, its a genetic disorder (that also actually occurs in humans as well). I cant recall the name but i can look it up if you'd like

i have absolutely no clue if this happens in snakes though. Does the reptile/snake genome even use the X and Y to differentiate sex?

[Serpent_Nirvana]

male tricolor cats can have the different DNA sets, or be XXY instead of XY, its a genetic disorder (that also actually occurs in humans as well). I cant recall the name but i can look it up if you'd like

i have absolutely no clue if this happens in snakes though. Does the reptile/snake genome even use the X and Y to differentiate sex?

In humans, the XXY genotype is called Klienfelter's syndrome. XXY males are almost always sterile (both Klienfelter humans and male calico cats), so if these paradox snakes are proving out as breeders, they are probably not XXY.

In addition, however, I don't believe snakes have the XY sex chromosome system. I believe, for what very few species have been studied, that they have a ZW system like birds -- females are the heterogametic sex (ZW), while males are ZZ.

So, this does mean that a fertile "calico" male snake would be possible -- BUT, that would have to mean that that the locus for the color in question would be located on the "Z" chromosome, which I don't believe is the case for most of the morphs we propagate based on the pattern of inheritance. So, I tend to doubt that paradoxes are calicos ...

Though of course, I don't even know if the pattern of sex inheritance has been studied in boid snakes ...

Freakie Frog -- I'm not quite sure what you're saying with the mutant gene not quite "suppressing" the normal gene. The mutant albino gene, for example, isn't suppressing melanin production, it's just defective -- no melanin produced. (And of course, you only need one functional gene to produce enough melanin to be normally colored, which is why albino is a recessive trait ...) So, in a paradox, I would think that, instead of the mutant gene failing to suppress the melanin production in some patches of cells, it would be more like the normal gene somehow manages to get expressed despite the fact that there shouldn't be a functional gene present. (In the case of homozygous paradoxes ...)

Which is just ... Weird.

(I feel like maybe that is what you were trying to say, though, and I just wasn't understanding your meaning ... )