Desert! To FAIL or not to FAil??????

[Jabberwocky Dragons]

Short answer is no...this has been posted around in a few forums, and this post by Nick Mutton sums up what you're asking.

"Originally Posted by Nick Mutton View Post
Adding more genes wont help, I dont understand why this gets brought up so often.

All morphs are essentially defective genes, we may like the visual results but they are caused by broken genes that are not doing their job(s) properly.

If a gene is broken in such a way as to interfere with female fertility, how on earth is adding even more defective genes going to help? Thats just not a realistic possibility.

Morphs dont fix other morphs, its that simple.

The reality of breeding exclusively for morphs is that some have baggage. Genes do multiple and often seemingly unrelated jobs. So when a gene is not doing its color/pattern job correctly, its likely not doing any of its other jobs correctly either. While most often this may be benign, on occasion this disruption in the genes other responsibilities may have unfortunate consequences.

Just think about what all of us are actually doing. We are engaged in a what amounts to a race. A race to create animals with as many defective genes as possible!!!

Why then is anyone surprised when some of these animals have problems or issues?

I enjoy morphs myself and have pile so of them but the desert is not the first morph with possible issues and it certainly wont be the last.

Nick"

This is not true. Morphs are mutations. Mutations can be defective but they can also be extremely beneficial... think X-Men . In all seriousness though, mutations are what drive evolution, can be beneficial or defective, and viewing them as a race to defectiveness is a poor way of viewing incredible morphs.

It is extremely unlikely but it is not impossible that adding a second mutation can cancel out the harmful effects of the first. Two ways that come to mind:

1) The Desert gene mutation creates a Stop codon which ends translation and causes infertility. Adding a second gene creates a mutation that changes the stop codon to a different, harmless codon that does not affect fertility.

2) Some amino acids have several different codons that code for them. The desert gene mutates a single nucleotide in females that creates a codon that causes infertility. The second mutation changes another nucleotide in the same codon to either create an original pre-desert amino acid or a new one that doesn't affect fertility...

Both of these scenarios are extremely unlikely but it is possible for another mutation to fix a mutation. I don't think this is the case for the desert morph and hadn't planned on jumping in but I couldn't let the morph = defectives comment go.