EXACTLY WHAT I'VE BEEN FREAKIN SAYING!!! Thankyou for summing it up so nicely!!! PropsOriginally Posted by RandyRemington
Technically the only way to prove spider dominant would be if a homozygous one was proven by breeding to normals and producing a large number of only spiders and that proven homozygous animal was just like the more common heterozygous spiders except for breeding results. It has been widely assumed that spider is dominant because a different looking potential homozygous spider hasn’t been reported from spider X spider breedings but that doesn’t prove it dominant as there are other possible explanations.
So far I've not seen anyone come forward and claim to have a proven homozygous spider much less tell us what it's like.
Each egg from spider X spider should have a 25% chance of being a homozygous spider but if these eggs don't hatch or the homozygous spider babies don't grow up to breed it would be considered a homozygous lethal mutation which I think would be technically co-dominant because the homozygous is different than the heterozygous. There may be several homozygous lethal ball python mutations and the hets can still be very healthy and make very nice combinations with other morphs but eventually people will stop breeding the morph to its self trying to make homozygous versions.
Also, you may sometimes see "dominant" misused where "homozygous" should be used in the ball python community. For example, it's incorrect to refer to super pastel as the dominant form of pastel. The super pastel is the homozygous form of pastel. Because it looks different than the regular heterozygous pastel which is also a morph the mutation type is co-dominant. The mutation type refers to the mutation it's self and how it interacts with it's normal version and does not change from pastel to super pastel, only the genotype is changing - from heterozygous to homozygous.