I found this very interesting

[OhhWatALoser]

So was the leucistic parent the father or the mother (suppose father is more likely, I can't stand to take the time to actually watch videos).

35 seconds in....male BEL

[RandyRemington]

Darn, someone said normal X bel so I thought maybe it was a parthenogenic bel female.

Thanks! Hey, I finally broke down and went on facebook this year. Maybe in a few more years I'll start watching videos.

[BHReptiles]

Turn your sound on when you watch the video, he explains the best theory we have at the time.


I'm curious what happen when it reproduces, if the theory is true.

Does it always throw the mojave gene, since the other gene is damaged, thus making it act like a true BEL?
Does the damage gene get passed as a damaged/not expressed gene, with the ability to keep producing this phenomenon?
Or depending on why it's damaged/not being expressed does it pass as normal, thus making the animal a mojave that looks like a BEL.
or is the theory completely wrong?

can't wait to hear the results of that animal's offspring. there have been a couple animals popping up with this going on.

I heard the theory...it just doesn't make sense to me. I LOVE genetics. I would marry genetics if I could (yes, I'm a nerd). If he only had one copy of the mojave gene...he wouldn't express it as a bell. It would still be like a mojave gene and a damaged wildtype gene. I guess logically his theory doesn't make sense to me. Something that makes more sense (if only to me), is that the mother either A. was a very bad example of a mojave (it would be nice to know what HER parents were) that was just assumed to be normal or B. there is some other gene linked to the mojave gene. One gene that controls the actual pattern and one unknown gene that's paired to it. Then the mother could have a damaged mojave pattern gene, but when the other gene is paired with the mojave, it then expresses the super form.

[OhhWatALoser]

I heard the theory...it just doesn't make sense to me. I LOVE genetics. I would marry genetics if I could (yes, I'm a nerd). If he only had one copy of the mojave gene...he wouldn't express it as a bell. It would still be like a mojave gene and a damaged wildtype gene. I guess logically his theory doesn't make sense to me. Something that makes more sense (if only to me), is that the mother either A. was a very bad example of a mojave (it would be nice to know what HER parents were) that was just assumed to be normal or B. there is some other gene linked to the mojave gene. One gene that controls the actual pattern and one unknown gene that's paired to it. Then the mother could have a damaged mojave pattern gene, but when the other gene is paired with the mojave, it then expresses the super form.

excuse my comment, i misunderstood.

mojave is an incomplete dominant to wild type.

When two wild types are paired together, it looks normal.
When a mojave and wild type are paired together, they are both expressed as mojave.
When two mojave genes are paired together nothing is expressed but the mojave gene (BEL)

the theory is, when the mojave and wild type scenario comes up, the wild type gene is damaged in some sort of way where it is not expressed. So all that is expressed is the single mojave gene, which we know is a BEL.
the wild type gene isn't there to make it look like a mojave. you don't need 2x mojave gene to make it look BEL, just need there to not be a wild type gene. which normally the only way to do that is to fill it with another mojave gene.

in short you need the mojave gene and the wild type gene to make it look mojave, without the wild type, it's going to just express the mojave gene, which is BEL.

[BHReptiles]

That makes sense. Same thought process, different route, slightly different angle.

[OhhWatALoser]

Darn, someone said normal X bel so I thought maybe it was a parthenogenic bel female.

Thanks! Hey, I finally broke down and went on facebook this year. Maybe in a few more years I'll start watching videos.

i see what you were getting at, yea not the case here.

what interesting is this "nuller theory" as far as i could find, it just simply a theory we made up and never proven anywhere in the genetic world. Like there isn't a term or definition in the "offical" scientific world for this. Unless someone can point me somewhere, but i looked far and wide when this came up before.

btw wth is this facebook you speak of? sounds like a bad time honestly.

[BHReptiles]

what interesting is this "nuller theory" as far as i could find, it just simply a theory we made up and never proven anywhere in the genetic world. Like there isn't a term or definition in the "offical" scientific world for this. Unless someone can point me somewhere, but i looked far and wide when this came up before.

I don't know if this will go over people's heads...but what happened sounds a lot like what happens in human genetics. Females are XX (we have two copies of the x-chromosome) whereas males are XY. Because females only need one copy of the x-chromosome to express the genes, they "turn off" the second x-chromosome so we aren't expressing both. It's called a "bar body." What it sounds like is happening, is that, for some strange reason), the wild-type gene is "turning off" either because it's damaged or maybe because it's not even there (perhaps something happened in the cell division before the mother made her follicles and her wild type gene was simply left out). That would mean there would only be one copy of the mojave gene and thus giving the BEL.

I don't know if that made sense...but if you generally can follow genetics, it might make some sense to you.

[artist&writer]

Snakehobbyist - I was thinking along those same lines myself.

This the guys website. http://www.arpythons.net/

The guy has a KRE shirt on in the video, so this is the one I saw at the show last month. He had her separate from the rest of what he had with a NFS sign on her cage. When I walked by I said, " Oh, that's a nice super mojave". That's when he told me the story behind her.

[irishanaconda]

The vid was posted by john abrams, same person as arpythons, yes

[Serpent_Nirvana]

I don't know if this will go over people's heads...but what happened sounds a lot like what happens in human genetics. Females are XX (we have two copies of the x-chromosome) whereas males are XY. Because females only need one copy of the x-chromosome to express the genes, they "turn off" the second x-chromosome so we aren't expressing both. It's called a "bar body." What it sounds like is happening, is that, for some strange reason), the wild-type gene is "turning off" either because it's damaged or maybe because it's not even there (perhaps something happened in the cell division before the mother made her follicles and her wild type gene was simply left out). That would mean there would only be one copy of the mojave gene and thus giving the BEL.

I don't know if that made sense...but if you generally can follow genetics, it might make some sense to you.

This is a little rambly; my apologies and I make no guarantees about accuracy ...

Yes, I think you're on the right track.

OWAL, I don't believe that the null theory was totally made up by snake people. The actual term is "hemizygosity;" in this case, we're specifically talking about (theoretical) autosomal hemizygosity. Here's an outside link to one definition, so you know I didn't just make it up (I have heard it referred to as the "null phenomenon," and I can't find any reference to that anywhere else so I do think someone in the reptile community might've made that term up. It's a nice made-up term, though!!)

http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Hemizygous

And yes, recessive sex-linked traits give a wonderful example of why this occurs. OWAL already touched on it once -- when we explain genetics, we often explain it as far as "copies" of a gene. For example, we like to say that the animal needs "two copies" of the albino gene to be phenotypically albino, because albino is recessive. However, this really isn't the case -- what is the case is that the animal needs NO copies of the wild-type gene. If the animal has even one copy of the wild-type gene, then it will be able to produce melanin effectively and will look normal. If it has NO copies of the wild-type gene, it will look albino -- whether it has two copies of the albino gene, or only one.

This is why some diseases show up so much more often in male humans than in female humans. Hemophilia is the classic example. One normal copy of the gene for factor VIII (F8) will allow the blood to clot normally. The gene is found on the X chromosome. Most human women have two copies of the X chromosome (XX), so they have two copies of the F8 gene, one on each X chromosome. If one doesn't work, they still produce enough Factor VIII to clot normally. In human men, who have only one X chromosome, if they lose the one copy they're screwed.

I am still trying to find out whether the autosomal hemizygous theory is proven in other species or not. I think that it is thought to be a factor in higher than expected ratios of certain recessive diseases in humans ... Still trying to confirm this though.

I also don't know whether the animal will be able to reproduce normally, and more specifically, what happens to the offspring that inherit the "null" mojave gene ... I would assume it would be unable to throw the wild-type gene, though, since in theory it doesn't actually have one.

And, IMO, if this animal DOES produce wild-type offspring, that suggests that we might be wrong as to what's happening here. (Unless someone can counter me on that, which I would welcome ...)

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Also --

Thank you, Randy; I thought I was the only person on the Internet who lacks the patience to watch videos.