A clutch I definitely won't forget! When bad odds finally turn good...

[sho220]

I think you should be able to see the enchi in the pastel easy enough in the last picture I posted of the clutch.

The banding does give it a nice Enchi look, however I don't think there's any Enchi there. Just nice banding and nice Pastel genes...

[rascal_rascal_99]

I'm not surprised by the doubting...they'll be seen by more people in person, experienced people, in the near future.

[kikkimea]

You said you had 14 normal babies from two inc dom males and then you said one 7 normals clutch was Enchi, but that's a co-dom.. Just saying..

[rascal_rascal_99]

You said you had 14 normal babies from two inc dom males and then you said one 7 normals clutch was Enchi, but that's a co-dom.. Just saying..

Actually...no, it's not. Incomplete dominate/inc dom is the correct term for it, not co-dom.

[kikkimea]

Sorry, I didn't pay attention when reading this, I was thinking of unproven dominant, such as Spider and Pinstripe..

They both mean the same thing, but most people, myself included, say co-dom and so does WOB, so let's not split hairs ok

[aalomon]

Sorry, I didn't pay attention when reading this, I was thinking of unproven dominant, such as Spider and Pinstripe..

They both mean the same thing, but most people, myself included, say co-dom and so does WOB, so let's not split hairs ok

Actually, no. The correct term would be incomplete dominance. The ball python community just commonly uses the incorrect term. Its not big deal, but the biologist in me couldnt skip over someone saying they are the same thing.

Easy example - Flower with one allele for white petals and one allele for red petals.
Codom - You get a flower with solid red spots and solid white spots on its petals, no pink (mixing).
Incomplete Dom - You get a flower with all pink petals (no solid white or red).

[kikkimea]

Actually, no. The correct term would be incomplete dominance. The ball python community just commonly uses the incorrect term. Its not big deal, but the biologist in me couldnt skip over someone saying they are the same thing.
Easy example - Flower with one allele for white petals and one allele for red petals.
Codom - You get a flower with solid red spots and solid white spots on its petals, no pink (mixing).
Incomplete Dom - You get a flower with all pink petals (no solid white or red).

Could you give an example with ball pythons then? We're not breeding flowers

[aalomon]

Sorry, flowers are the common example.

I think an easy one would be the BEL complex. When you breed a super lesser BEL to a normal you get hatchlings that have one BEL allele and one normal allele. Lessers are significantly lighter than normals but are not as white as BEL. They are also evenly lighter all over their body (red+white=pink, incomplete dominance). If it was a codominant situation, the hatchlings would look very similar to pieds. They would have sections of pure white and sections of normal coloration, but no intermediate color (white+red=large splotches of both colors, co dominance).

The same is true with super pastels, enchis, spotnose, black pastels and all the other genes we commonly call codom.....in all cases the animals with a single allele look different from both the super and normals, having an intermediate look. If all those genes were codoms, we would have a lot of animals looking like they were splashed with different colors of paint.

[rascal_rascal_99]

Thank you for adding your 2 cents and giving an explanation of the terms...I've often used the example of if an ivory was a codom, it's het form would look like a pied even though I wasn't sure how exactly correct that is, it seems to help people start to make the connection with what the terms actually are.

WoBP is a great site and helps a lot of people, but it isn't perfect, it has it's mistakes, and unfortunately perpetuates the incorrect terminology that the BP world seems determined to stick with.

[kc261]

I've heard 2 common examples of codom as it is correctly used in biology. Red & white spotted flowers is one. Roan cattle is another, where although the overall look is a "pink" cow, when you look closely, each individual hair is either red or white. So red & white both COexist, thus COdom.

I can't think of a single example of actual codominance in BPs, but somehow that is the term that gets used. If all the morphs we call "codom" actually were, then they'd all look like various versions of pied! Or they might have a speckled look because each scale is either color A or color B. Like lesser scales randomly distributed beside normal scales.

Honestly, a lot of the BP morphs don't fit terribly well in the definition of incomplete dominance. Pastel does. You have normal, then pastel (more yellows & blushing), then super pastel (lots more yellows & blushing). If you were shown a normal and a pastel, you could guess reasonably well what the super form looks like. Just like the transition from red to pink to white flowers. But some of the other morphs have super forms that really don't look like "even more of the same thing" the way super pastel does.

Which ties in to an explanation I often give when people ask how hets for a recessive trait can show through. Doesn't recessive mean there is no visible change in the het form? The problem is that dominant, recessive, incomplete dominant and codominant are words that humans made up to attempt to describe things they saw in nature. However, Mother Nature never agreed to play by those rules. The definitions do not perfectly describe all the variations that we see in nature.