oh.

actually it sounds like bad news for me. i think its just super cool and awesome that all leopards are het pied; and now its no longer true because someone managed to split the two things apart.

i guess the classic pied-maker leopards will now be the premium version, with the isolated leopards being more of a curiosity.

BTW the mechanism how this can happen is quite clear. if different genes are on different chromosomes they just get randomly distributed during reproduction. if two genes are on the same chromosome, but far apart within that chromosome, its still pretty much random because crossovers that can combine both onto the same cromosome or that can split them up again are likely to occur between those two locations. crossovers happen frequently, and if there is lots of space where crossovers can happen between the two genes, it will happen basically all the time.

if two genes are on the same chromosome and closer together, chances of a crossover happening between the two genes drop down. the closer they are together, the harder it is to combine them, and when they combine, they will stick together to a degree.

if two genes are incredibly close together on the same chromosome, basically almost allelic, then to split them you need a crossover to happen at exactly the right location. which is very unlikely. so you can work with your pied-maker leopards for years without such a split happening in your breeding operation.

that might be whats going on here. so leopard and pied are almost perfectly allelic but still have some base pairs of distance between them.