Quote Originally Posted by AshleyB View Post
so a spider... wouldnt that be codom because it can make a super, or is it considered dom since its already a visual.

mojave is a het for bel right? so is the mojave co dom?
spider is dom, but what happens if you mix spider (dom) and pastel (dom) to make bee, wouldnt that mean the animals are codom?

so confusing
A spider can't make a super, so it is a dominant mutation. Mojave is het for BEL so it is a co-dom. If you breed a spider (dom) to a pastel (co-dom) you can get bees. This isn't a super form though, it's a combo with each bee carrying one copy for each of the two mutations. So if you breed two bees together you can get super pastel spiders (killer bees), but you can't get pastel super spiders because spiders are dominant, and don't have a visual homozygous form. At least not one that differs from the heterozygous form. Co-dominant basically means that the heterozygous animal will display a visual mutation that is leading to the super form or homozygous animal.

If an animal needs 2 of 2 alleles to have the mutation to show a visual morph, that is the recessive gene. A piebald is a recessive because it needs both alleles of that gene to display a visual difference. Albinos and caramel albinos are also recessive because they need both copies to display the visual trait. If say (this isn't the case) caramel albinos would show the trait with only one copy of the gene, but having two copies of the gene increased this lack of melanin to the point where the homozygous caramel had no black pigment (the albino), we would say that caramels are co-doms, and their super form was an amelanistic snake. The caramel would be het for albino. Right now since albinos are a recessive mutation we just call them hets for albino because albino hets don't have any different look from a normal. But if the hets looked like caramels, we would call caramels co-doms, and we would call true albinos super caramels or t-albinos. I'm starting to confuse myself here, but this is basically it:

Recessive - needs 2 of 2 copies of the gene to show the trait - hets look normal
Dominant - only needs 1 copy to show the trait, but having 2 copies looks the same as if it had one. There are no hets (it either is a spider or it isn't) and it has no visual super form
Co-dominant - only needs 1 copy to show the trait - having 2 copies of the gene will produce a super form - co-doms are visual hets for the super forms - there are no hets for co-doms since they are technically already hets (you either have a pastel or you don't. A if you have a pastel it is a het for super pastel).