Quote Originally Posted by ctrlfreq View Post
I personally think this is just a condition of any breeding hobby though, since heterozygous forms are often found, sometimes years, before a homozygous form is located or produced. Since proving a trait is genetic often takes multiple generations, by the time we locate the homozygous form, we're usually well ensconced in the fallacy of the heterozygous form being, itself, a discreet morph, and thus name the homozygous version something different completely (ie. mojave vs. BluEL, fire vs BlaEL, yb vs. ivory, etc).

That's a big part of the confusing genetics lingo with balls. While all these should technically be called hets for whatever the super is, it takes time to even find out whether or not these new mutations are co-dominant for something, and what the super form, if there is one, will look like. So someone gives these hets their own name before it's ever even know whether it's a dominant or co-dominant trait, and usually before its even known whether the phenotype is genetic or not. Then if it proves out to be a co-dom with a super form, the super usually gets a new name that has little or nothing to do with the name the het was labeled. It would definitely be easier for everyone to understand if either names weren't decided for the hets until a superform was produced and named, or all supers were labeled only as super (whatevers). The current system doesn't bother me, but if we are trying to keep ball python genetics simple to comprehend, we aren't doing the best job.