Quote Originally Posted by LadyOhh View Post
So you are saying that a normal can be Het for Pastel???

I think I am misunderstanding your arguement here.
I think the problem here all goes back to a misunderstanding of what heterozygous means. I didn't say anything about a normal looking pastel het. Many ball python people hear the word het and think it has to look normal because with the recessive mutations where they first learned about hets they just happened to look normal. You made the jump from het pastel to normal looking because of the common and deeply ingrained misunderstanding of the word het in the ball python community.

The solution is to stop thinking heterozygous means "normal looking gene carrier".

Het also doesn't mean "half way to something else". Technically a pastel isn't het for super pastel. Even if it turns out that spider or pinstripe are dominant and the homozygous versions look the same there will still be heterozygous spiders and pinstripes. In fact, if we ever do get a proven dominant ball python mutation it will be more important than ever to understand genotype terms because the heterozygous and homozygous mutant genotype animals will look the same so we’ll have to start talking about het pinstripes (or whatever mutation) to tell them apart.

The key is to go back to the real meaning of heterozygous - having an unmatched pair of whatever genes you are talking about. Deciding what a heterozygous animal looks like in relation to a homozygous normal and a homozygous mutant depends on the mutation type. The pastel phenotype animals are heterozygous for the pastel mutation because they have two different versions of the pastel gene; one with the pastel mutation inherited from one of the parents and one normal for pastel version of the pastel gene inherited from the other parent. Because pastel is a co-dominant mutation the hets do not look normal and the homozygous for the pastel mutation animals are a different non normal phenotype animal.