quick question

[yoyocrazy]

i plan on buying a 50% het patternless female but how do i know that it is het patternless.

 

[Carinata]

By breeding it to a het patternless or patternless. 50% het patternless, simply means that there is a 50% chance that animal carries the trait for patternless. I saw those on kingsnake, they are way over priced.

 

[TokayKeeper]

possible hets, in this case a 50% poss het is the result of breeding a heterozygous animal to a normal. From such a pairing, 50% of the offpsring have a chance of carrying the trait, the other 50% won't. This is statistically based, so with a large sample set you should roughly see a 50/50 outcome. The only problem is that ALL the offpsring from such a cross will phenotypically appear normal. Another way of looking at it is that each individual egg has a 50/50 chance of carrying the trait.

Furthermore, when dealing with recessive trait and you cross a heterozygous animal to another heterozygous animal the result is a 1:2:1 ratio genotypically and a 3:1 ratio phenotypically. So out of 4 offspring, 1 will be completely normal, 2 will be heterozygous, and 1 will be homozygous recessive from a genotype standpoint. Phenotypically, you'll have 3 normals and 1 recessive. This gives rise to the term 66% hets because 2 of the 3 normals have the ability to potentially carry the recessive trait.

In all honesty, the whole possible het thing is a crap shoot, but it does at least tell you that somewhere within the lineage a particular trait was introduced. Otherwise, it's pretty much just a marketing term to get you to pay more for something that odds wise will most likely just be a normal unless you buy the entire clutch to one by one prove out who is and isn't het.

 

[Imperial Geckos]

Hey Trenton,

glad to see you here on GF. Like i explained, a 50% possible het. means just that. It have the 50% chance of carrying the patternless gene. Since there is no visual way to identify a heterozygous animals vs. a normal all babies are considered to be 50% possible het. for patternless.

possible hets, in this case a 50% poss het is the result of breeding a heterozygous animal to a normal. From such a pairing, 50% of the offpsring have a chance of carrying the trait, the other 50% won't. This is statistically based, so with a large sample set you should roughly see a 50/50 outcome. The only problem is that ALL the offpsring from such a cross will phenotypically appear normal. Another way of looking at it is that each individual egg has a 50/50 chance of carrying the trait.

Furthermore, when dealing with recessive trait and you cross a heterozygous animal to another heterozygous animal the result is a 1:2:1 ratio genotypically and a 3:1 ratio phenotypically. So out of 4 offspring, 1 will be completely normal, 2 will be heterozygous, and 1 will be homozygous recessive from a genotype standpoint. Phenotypically, you'll have 3 normals and 1 recessive. This gives rise to the term 66% hets because 2 of the 3 normals have the ability to potentially carry the recessive trait.

In all honesty, the whole possible het thing is a crap shoot, but it does at least tell you that somewhere within the lineage a particular trait was introduced. Otherwise, it's pretty much just a marketing term to get you to pay more for something that odds wise will most likely just be a normal unless you buy the entire clutch to one by one prove out who is and isn't het.

This is not true in every case. The 50% het. he is talking about is coming from me. I produced the animal myself last year. It came from a het x dominant breeding.

And actually, I myself produced my first patternless from a two possible hets.

 

[M_surinamensis]

Otherwise, it's pretty much just a marketing term to get you to pay more for something that odds wise will most likely just be a normal unless you buy the entire clutch to one by one prove out who is and isn't het.

Er... odds-wise, it's a one in two chance, provided it is being represented honestly (as it is in this case). I suppose market-wide the existence of falsely labeled hets sold by frauds would skew the actual ratio relative to the labeled ratio, but that's not really applicable to a single animal. In the case of percentages over fifty percent, then it's "most likely" heterozygous for the trait.

One other thing though... buying an entire clutch doesn't guarantee or even improve the odds of possible hets proving out. Mendelian averages are useful as predictors and can be viewed as generalizations over extremely large sample sets, but each individual animal represents its own unique set of possibilities, unaffected by the results of siblings from the same parents. It's a little like flipping a coin; there's a one in two chance of it coming up heads each time it is flipped, but coming up one way or the other last flip has no bearing on what it will do next flip. Each flip of the coin, or roll of the dice, or formation of the zygote is independent of the others.

Also of note, as a point of general clarification, possible hets either are or are not heterozygous for the listed trait. The percentages are a measurement of odds, odds which can be resolved through proof one way or the other. If a 50% possible het for glow in the dark is bred to another animal that has glow in the dark genes and the offspring express glow in the dark, then the "possible" part is dropped, the animal is a known het and the calculated odds of any unknown offspring are recalculated from that point.

Personally, I want possible hets labeled down to about 25% as a minimum (lower is better, but I understand most people pretty well give up calculating, much less labeling, anything lower than that), coming from the direction I do, I'd be kind of irritated if recessive color mutations started cropping up in a breeding project that I wasn't expecting.

 

[acpart]

I would agree that an animal priced higher because it's a "possible het" is a "marketing term", but otherwise I see it as a way to let the buyer know about possible outcomes.

Aliza