outcross meaning?

[boutiquegecko]

I'm not exactly clear on the outcross. Mainly I see it with stripes involved. Ex would be a stipe outcross or bell het from stripe outcross. Does this mean you need to breed back to stripe or whatever to get more of the pattern? Are these guys from 2 diff lines, like say Albey hypo bred to Hines hypo? Is outcross what is meant by introducing new blood into the line? I guess I don't understand why they are called that unless to inform someone that the line has been bred out???

 

[Golden Gate Geckos]

Good question! When particular morphs are continually line-bred (or inbred), they need to be 'outcrossed' to strengthen the gene-pool or reinforce a certain trait. Take the example of redstripes... they were bred back to their parents or to their siblings to create their deep, orange stripes. After awhile, the gene pool gets too shallow and the stripes begin to fade or are no longer nice and bold, so they would need to be crossed into other unrelated redstripes or perhaps even some bold stripes to get the striped pattern to be more defined.

Another example would be SHTCTB's. Let's say you have a line-bred group that produces killer carrot-tails, but their body color was not a orange as you would like. In order to achieve the deeper orange body coloration you would have to 'outcross' them with unrelated geckos that have superior color.