Quote Originally Posted by kellysballs View Post
I think you are a little confused on the dominant thing.

Spider is a dominant gene. This means that the heterozygous form and the homozygous form look exactly a like and you cannot tell the difference between the two. Most spiders you see for sale and that are produced are heterozygous animals.

Woma is a co-dominant gene. This means that the heterozygous form looks different from the normal and the homozygous. In the case of the woma the homozygous form is called the pearl and it is supposidly (sp) lethal with all babies dying in the egg or shortly after they emerge (as you stated).

All and all they are two different genes that produce similar looking animals in their heterozygous forms.
I believe you are getting these two terms confused with recessive genes. To my knowledge there has never been a dominant Spider produced. Let me be clear, a dominant Spider would be like a Super Pastel in that breeding a Super Pastel to anything other than a Pastel would produce all visual Pastels. So if you bred a Super Pastel to a Spider you would produce an entire clutch of Pastels, however half of them would be Bumble Bees since the Spider gene is Co-dominant.

This is not to say that you couldn't luck out on the odds and produce an entire clutch of Bumble Bees but in most cases since the Spider gene is Co-Dominant you would more often than not get half and half.

The Woma gene however does have what is believed to be a Dominant or "Super" form. To my knowledge the idea that it is Dominant is purely speculation since I don't know that anyone has ever raised one up and breed it to prove this theory out.

Layman's Definitions
Homozygous - The visual state of a particular gene or trait
Heterozygous - The state of a recessive trait in it's non homozygous (visual) form
Dominant - A gene that supersedes the natural appearance
Co-Dominant - A gene that is equally available in appearance as the natural appearance