Question about Genetics

[Daigga]

That's okay, I'll just come up with more questions lol.

If this is the case, how come when I run a normal and a banana ball through the calculator it says half will be bananas and half normal. With what you said, shouldn't some be a visual mix of both?

Normal and banana are both dominant traits and very different from each other. In the case of most ball python morphs, you don't actually see a visual mix of two genes. The babies will come out either all normal or all banana with no normal-banana whackjob thrown in there (usually, sometimes paradoxes happen, but those follow no known genetic rules).

For clarification! There are three types of morphs; Recessive, dominant, and incomplete dominant (also called co-dominant). In recessive genes, two copies of the gene are needed to produce visible offspring. If one parent is homozygous (has two copies of the gene and displays it visually) and is bred to a non-carrier of the gene, all offspring produced will be het for that trait (remember punnet squares? They come in handy here)

In dominant traits, such as pinstripe, a single copy of the gene is visually expressed. This is like brown hair in humans, BB (homozygous) or Bb (heterozygous) will both give you visually brown hair, but it won't look any different either way.

Incomplete dominant, or codominant, is interesting in that the same rules apply as in recessive, except that a heterozygous offspring still expresses a visual version of that trait, just not in such a way as the homozygous version.