Quote Originally Posted by bigballs View Post
so if the pinstripe is said to have a homozygous form that has a phenotype very similar to it's heterozygous form would the pinstripe morph still considered dominant or is it now considered codominant because the full expression of the gene requires two copies?
Not very similar. Its the same. The homozygous pinstripe we are talking about looks the same as the heterozegous pinstripe.

i understand the concept of double homozygous recessive morphs such as the snow, i think i am confusing the difference between labelling dominant and codominant morphs with dominant and codominant genes
When someone says dominant or codominant morph they are saying that the gene that causes the morph is dominant or codominant.

for example one book i read says that the pastel is a codominant form where as super pastel is the dominant form.
The super pastel is the homozygous phenotype (form).

but after reading the posts in this thread i now think that pastel is a codom gene that requires two copies of itself to be fully expressed and that a super pastel is not a dominant gene, it is just a visual expression of two copies of the codominant pastel gene but we label it as the dominant or super form.
We label it the Super form and say that its homozygous for the trait. The key is that a super pastel when bred to a normal ball python will produce all pastels. And when you breed two pastels together you get 1/4 normal, 1/2 pastels, and 1/4 super pastels.

so i think that when we talk about dominant or codominant in ball python terms we are refferring to whether or not a certain morph has a known super form or not and we are not reffering to the actual genotype of the animal.
Kinda, The important thing is to learn how recessive and dominant traits work. Once you got that you are left knowing that there is no way short of a genetic test or breeding the animal to tell if an animal is het for a recessive or homozygous for a dominant. Once you understand that we go a head and complicated things by saying "Oh yeah there is another way a gene can work and that's called codominant" and that's really the most intuitive. The problem is that we spend so much time understanding dominant and recessive that its hard to understand something as simple as codominant. With codom, if you have no gene you have no signs of the trait, if you have one you have some signs, if you have two you have the actual trait.