Morphs - little over my head.

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jaspy

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Hey to all of you knowledgeable human beings,

When I see the acronyms HET, RP 100% dominant, co-dominant and all this and that to be honest i'm just super confused.

Anyone care to share with me a bit of newbie information on what everything means and really what differences it all makes.

GREATLY APPRECIATED!
 
95% of people on this site don't understand those terms, I suggest you do further research beyond this site.
 
The terms you listed I think I understand but there are so many more that I don't like hybrid vs mutation vs morph and came to the following conclusion: I am focused on only being a "pet owner" so don't care.

Like stated above, people don't seem to know the difference and at the end of the day they're just human labels. I don't worry about how many times removed my mum's cousin's children are, they're my cousins and I'm happy to leave it at that.
 
Het is an abbreviation of the term 'Heterozygous' - this means that the animal possess two different alleles of a gene. Hetero = het = different. This is usually used to describe animals that carry one copy of a recessive allele - something like a het albino darwin for instance. An animal like this has one copy of the albino allele and one copy of the wildtype (normal) allele. When hets are bred together they produce approximately 25% homozygous recessive animals (look further down for explanation), 50% het animals and 25% normal animals - this is where the term 66% het comes from as there is a 66% chance that you will get a het animal from the clutch (used when there is no visual way to determine if the animal carries a recessive copy or not).

Homozygous: the opposite of heterozygous - the animal has two identical copies of the same allele. This can be used to describe recessive animals that display the desired phenotype (look) - an albino darwin is a homozygous animal as it only has albino copies. This can also be used to describe animals that breed true wildtype hatchies - i.e. they do not carry any recessive genetics - although this isn't common at all. If you breed two homozygous animals together (provided that they are the same type of homozygous, i.e. you breed two albino darwins together) you will only get homozygous animals (as there are no other alleles present). If you breed a homozygous animal (albino darwin) to a het animal (het darwin) you get 50% recessive homozygous type and 50% heterozygous (this is because there are two combinations - two recessive albino alleles OR one recessive albino allele and one normal allele).

Recessive: a trait that needs two copies in order to be expressed or seen as the phenotype.

Co-dominant - also known as incomplete dominance - when only one copy is required in order to see the phenotype on the animal, an example would be jaguar carpet pythons.
 
ahh thank you, I think even to understand what you've explained to me I should enroll in a herpetology degree. But cheers all the same
 
Genetics is a very interesting subject, and addictive once you get a handle on it, my handle comes from breeding budgies for 20 something years, and I think the "Terms" we use are maybe easier to understand, but anyway, if you really want to understand genetics and mode of inheritance etc, pick up a biology book and start at the beginning with the basics, one first needs to know what an "Allele" is :D
 
Thanks Pauls_Pythons.

Jaspy - feel free to PM me and we can chat about it from there :)
 
I don't know who's photo's the genetics sheets where, maybe carpetpythons.com put them up. he has some very good charts explaining these terms in photos on his site.

- - - Updated - - -

I would like to know if malanism (completely black snake) is a Heterozygous and homozygous like albino's. Ressesive or Co-Dominant. so I have more understanding to how many years I'll need to invest in a project.
 
melanism was proven overseas with some jungles (or perhaps daimond x jungles crosses) to be recessive. There are projects in the works here in Aus at Snake Ranch with Darwins.
 
I am going to be working on bhp's so recessive, good to know I have a very long project to keep me going ;)
 
A lot if not most hyper/hypo melanistic traits are polygenic, so I wouldn't be betting an unproven line will turn out recessive.
 
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