Quote Originally Posted by Eric Alan View Post
To explain the numbers, it's male.female.unsexed. Commonly, the last number is dropped if all sexes are known. So, 1.0 would be one male. 0.1 would be one female. 0.0.1 would be one unsexed animal. 4.16 would be four males and 16 females. And so on and so on...

As far as the Het thing goes, it only refers to recessive genes (albino, piebald, clown, hypo, etc). The % Het thing comes from the specific pairing that produced the offspring.
  • If one parent is a visually recessive snake, all non-visual offspring will be 100% Het for that recessive trait (guaranteed to be carrying the trait, but not showing it visually).
  • If one parent is 100% Het for a recessive trait, all offspring will be 50% possible Hets. You won't be able to tell which offspring are carrying the recessive trait and which aren't, hence the 50% designation.
  • If both parents are 100% Het for a recessive trait, all non-visually recessive offspring will be 66% possible Hets. Again, you can't tell which are carrying the recessive trait, but you do have a slightly better chance of them having it.
  • If you have anything that is less than 100% Het for a trait, you can't say anything about them or their offspring with any certainty until you breed them and produce/don't produce any visually recessive offspring.


I can also tell you that there are a fair amount of breeders out there that probably couldn't form a Punnett square if their life depended on it. Basically, they know that if they pair a male with three genes to a female with a single different gene, they have equal chances at any offspring ranging from a normal snake to a four gene animal (and every possible combination in between). The only real time a Punnett square is helpful is when there are overlapping genes between the two parents and you have increased chances of a few combinations. To get the actual odds in this scenario, just treat all of the genes as if they were different - when you get multiples of the same result, what you are actually seeing is an increased (doubled) possibility of producing that particular offspring compared with the rest of the offspring.

Does that help any?

Also, welcome to the site!
Yes, that helped a ton. Thanks for the welcome!