Proving Dominant Traits

[paulh]

but they are both live bearing snakes, so not likely the case here. Either way, cool stuff.

http://home.pcisys.net/~dlblanc/arti...enogenesis.php

Excellent article!

As this sort of thing has been found in egg-laying lizards and birds, it seems likely to be able to occur in egg-laying snakes.

I really am quite ignorant of the python reproductive cycle. At what point does the egg cell become associated with the follicle? Is ovulation when the egg cell gets paired up with the follicle? The egg cell is already fertilized then, right? Maybe homozygous spider is homozygous lethal before ovulation so only non-homozygous spider fertilized egg cells are available to use up all the available follicles. True, there should only be 66% spider offspring from spider X spider with this scenario but 78% might not be that statistically significant an over represented in this sample size and maybe spider sperm have an advantage in fertilizing egg cells anyway.

A single egg cell develops inside each follicle in the ovary. Ovulation occurs when the egg cell leaves the follicle. Fertilization occurs after ovulation.

Male spider x female normal produces both spider and normal offspring. So spider sperm can get to the eggs. But are there fewer spider offspring from this sort of mating than from a normal male x female spider mating? Anyone collected any statistics? For that matter has anyone collected statistics to see if there are the same, fewer or more spiders than normals from such matings? If there are statistically less than 50% spiders from spider x normal matings, it would be consistent with the lethal homozygous spider theory.