paradox

[OhhWatALoser]

Could the snake be proven as a chimera by testing its genetic makeup? I would think some scientist would be interested in checking on this interesting phenomenon.
It reminds me of the woman who had a maternity test to see if her baby was her husbands/boyfriends and when the test results came back they said her sister was the mother (she didn't have a sister... or at least she thought she didn't) Turns out she was a chimera.

im sure it could be proven a chimera but its really not that intresting in the grand scheme. Im sure it happens in every animal species just something that can happen during development. only reason its so intresting is its visual. who knows you could be a chimera or i could be one and we'd never know.

[dr del]

Hi,

I was actually reading something about this a couple of days ago that mentioned several ways different genetics can exist in the same individual.

I may have misunderstood because it said every female human was a mosaic because only one of the x chromosomes is active in each cell and one of the xx pair comes from the father?

Also something about marmosets commonly having their brothers sperm!

Apparently chimerism isn't always a rare occurance and can sometimes even be more common than what we think of as "the norm" depending on the species etc.


dr del

[Kingmorph69]

What about the Shatter ball??? I heard that was genetic.

[PythonWallace]

The chimera theory could be true some of the time, but several paradox balls have been produced from heterozygous x normal breedings, where the paradox animal had the paradox homozygous phenotype. The chimera theory is void in these cases since if the animal is simply merged twins, you would never see a homozygous animal. In these cases at least, it's almost as if one sperm fertilized another sperm, taking two copies of the mutated gene from a father that should only be able to pass on a single copy. I don't know.

[Watever]

If it wasn't genetic, or it was a chimera (sounds like a mediaval dragon name lol), how would you explain that we see more of them in the YB, Ivories and SuperStripe morphs ?

I think there is something genetic there, not something that can be explained by only 1 gene. I really think there is more and more gene in it. For this, you would need to breed some paradox to paradox and see if more paradox comes in. The problem is that the ball python don't produce that many eggs, making hard to make stats if there is 3 or 4 recessive gene that comes to play here.

[p3titexburial]

If it wasn't genetic, or it was a chimera (sounds like a mediaval dragon name lol), how would you explain that we see more of them in the YB, Ivories and SuperStripe morphs ?

I think there is something genetic there, not something that can be explained by only 1 gene. I really think there is more and more gene in it. For this, you would need to breed some paradox to paradox and see if more paradox comes in. The problem is that the ball python don't produce that many eggs, making hard to make stats if there is 3 or 4 recessive gene that comes to play here.

If it's not chimerism or passable genetics, it would probably be that the genes that block the production of the darker pigments have suddenly malfunctioned and that these gene are more prone to that specific type of mutation due to some combination of environmental and genetic factors.

The only way to figure it out is to breed'em I guess.

The thing with the paradoxes occurring spontaneously from normal to heterozygous isn't that strange to me... of course, it could be possible that the normal was actually het, but it is also possible that the egg/sperm itself that was first produced via meiotic division in the mother/father had a spontaneous mutation when it was being formed--remember, all inheritable morphs (other than the wild type) and genes were once mutations as well--the only difference is that they can be passed down to next generations.

One's an inheritable trait mutation, the other isn't.

So I can actually understand that occurring.

[WingedWolfPsion]

If a proven het X normal breeding resulted in a paradox, I would suspect that doubled chromosomes are going on there--just as some humans can be XXY or XYY, or XXYY. I have one friend who is XXXYY....no joke. lol (He seems fine except he has a hole in his heart).

You never know what might happen with appearance when you get things like that going on.

[CritterVet]

Hi,

I was actually reading something about this a couple of days ago that mentioned several ways different genetics can exist in the same individual.

I may have misunderstood because it said every female human was a mosaic because only one of the x chromosomes is active in each cell and one of the xx pair comes from the father?

Also something about marmosets commonly having their brothers sperm!

Apparently chimerism isn't always a rare occurance and can sometimes even be more common than what we think of as "the norm" depending on the species etc.


dr del

Yup, all female mammals are mosaics at the X chromosome. One X chromosome gets kicked out of a stem cell early in development, and the other one does all "the work." That is, the genes from only one X chromosome are expressed in each cell.

Cats offer a nice visual example of this. In cats, genes for coat color are carried on the X chromosome. A calico cat gets black from the X chromosome from one parent and orange from the X chromosome from the other parent. Whether an area is pigmented as orange or black depends on which X chromosome was kicked out early in development. That's why calico cats are always female. (the white spots come from a different co-dominant gene)

Note: snakes are a bit different from mammals in that males are ZZ and females are ZW.