Quote Originally Posted by tattlife2001 View Post
Just to show some numbers on this that I have produced myself. I have bred Spider to Spider 25 times in total, the last time was 4 years ago. Out of all of them I had 1 slug and 3 eggs go bad during incubation. I did use ultra sound and every number is the exact same for follicle count vs eggs/slugs. I was very lucky and hatched 5 males the first year and they were breeding normal females the next year and were not homo spiders. The females that were raised up that were spider and bred to normal males produced the standard outcome. This year is the last year I will be doing these breedings and currently have 91 eggs incubating from those pairings. So we will see. But so far nothing at all has shown any form of lethality or a super form at all. So with the amount of breedings done on this is a decent amount for a base case study and more can be done to add to it. As a side note there were no multi gene animals used through the entire process it was only spider to spider and then offspring to normals.
Wow, I had no idea anyone had done this much to try to prove homozygous spider. Thank you for your diligence on this! One of the theories on why we don't have a public proven homozygous spider yet is that there just haven't been many spider X spider breedings due to lack of interest. Are you ready to put numbers to how many spiders and how many normals were produced from the 25 spider X spider pairings? Even if we are only talking 100 - 200 total offspring the ratio might be significant (i.e. is it closer to 75% or 67%). Of course if you hit on proving a homozygous spider this year that will put it to rest but if not I'd also be very interested in how many potential homozygous spiders where bred failing to prove as 50 - 100 of those could also be a statistically significant sample size. If both stats point toward there not being a homozygous spider then it's very interesting how this can be given your follicle counting. I'm pretty ignorant on the technical details of python reproduction. Are the follicles not yet even fertilized when you are counting them? Someone mentioned something I took to be the possibility that a female spider egg could only be fertilized by a non spider sperm. I don't really understand how that could be but if anyone could elaborate on that I'd be very interested as it would seem the only way to explain these results given the low count of bad eggs and the follicular counts seeming to rule out homozygous spiders dying early. I think TSK's much smaller sample early on happened to have right around 1/4 small bad eggs so I was really expecting that but of course can't argue with actual numbers, especially such a nice sized sample. Did any of the spiders prove infertile? That’s another angle I guess that someone brought up. I once heard someone assert that the definition of homozygous lethal extended to infertile but that seems a bit of a stretch to me but whatever it would be called would be nice to know about.