Breeding questions

Enigmatic_Reptiles

Quality is Everything
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6,779
Location
Corona, CA
you cross them by breeding parents of different genetics together. I am not sure what exactly you are trying to figure out. It all boils down to mode of inheritance, genetics the breeders have, and the possibility of genetics lining up for your desired effect.
 

DoubleAGeckos

New Member
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164
Like let's say you have a Mack snow het tremper but you want to breed it to a bell how do you get the tremper out?
 

TokayKeeper

Evil Playsand User
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718
Location
Albuquerque, NM, USA
I'm going to be flat honest, blunt if you will...

I've been trying to wrap my brain around this on how you would breed to remove the tremper albino trait. I love genetics, reptiles, and biology, which are a few reasons why I have a degree in biology. My fiancée went the microbiology route, and she too loves genetics.

That in mind, our best answer we can come up with is to buy a bell albino and a mack snow to acheive what you're after in your example.

By test crossing all you'll accomplish is confirming that your mack snow het tremper is indeed het tremper. A test cross takes the unknown (which in this case is known...het tremper) and crosses it with a homozygous recessive (tremper albino). If you get any albino offspring, you've then confirmed it's heterozygous for Tremper albino. If you produce no albinos, well then all you have is a mack snow and now a whole bunch of offspring that are normals and mack snows that are het Tremper albino. This defeats what you're attempting to do: remove the Tremper trait.

The other means is outcrossing, but what that does is actually migrates the recessive trait through the population. Dominant traits would be easier to remove from a given population through outcrossing, accompanied with line-breeding and inbreeding as one can still see the expression of the traits. Outcrossing is typically done to restore vigor into a line.

Long story short, by trying to remove the tremper albino trait from your mack snow het tremper albino, you'd be wasting a lot of money, food, time, and caging trying to line breed the trait out. It can be done, but you'll be producing lots of hets and possible hets both for tremper albino and mack snow.

Additionally, my brain hurts now thinking about this. I might be overlooking the obvious while staring at handwritten and mentally drawn punnett squares to give me statistical outcomes of how or what direction you'd take to remove the trait. Shoot, I even thought about this long enough (though not much to show for it typed) that GF logged me out!
 

Wowoklol

New Member
Messages
456
Location
Columbus, Ohio
Mack snows are not expensive. Breeding then inbreeding and testing and waiting and breeding some more is. For your given example, this is not feasible as Tokay pointed out. You'd have to breed to non tremper, then take those babies and test them for poss. het tremper. Poss. many times. lol. Then once you think you have one non-het, you have to test breed that Multiple more generations just to make sure. The Odds are not rules. Just because you have 50% chance, doesn't mean you could go 0 for 10 and STILL be het. I could MAYBE see this being done if you were also line breeding that Snow for some specific trait. Otherwise you are making alot of regular snows het for tremper albino.

BTW, "het for mack snow" = Mack snow. Co-dom displays in het form. You won't see to many people label something "het for Mack Snow". I'm guessing just a little slip there.
 
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DoubleAGeckos

New Member
Messages
164
Thanks I read that article about the marble eyed project and he talked about out crossing the tremper I was just curious
 

ElapidSVT

lolwut?
Messages
1,370
Location
Grass Valley, California
outcrossing is the opposite of inbreeding to put it simply. it is when you breed an animal to an unrelated animal in an attempt to increase genetic diversity in your breeding population.

to get rid of the tremper albino gene in a heterozygous animal entails breeding it to normal animals with no albino genes and raising the offspring which are then tested for the presence of the gene by test breeding to an albino of the proper sex.

it's a 2 year project.
 

TokayKeeper

Evil Playsand User
Messages
718
Location
Albuquerque, NM, USA
I dunno about 2 years...

Say the mack snow het tremper is female, you'll obviously outcross with a normal male not known to possess any tremper albino genes anywhere within its lineage.

Let's assume this is the female's first season and you get a crazy number of 4 eggs. Statistically, each offspring has a 50/50 chance of being het for tremper still. Or in other words (and as you and I are aware) all offspring are 50% possible hets.

Let's then say you incubated for all females and all 4 eggs did hatch female. You can do 1 of 2 things: 1) conduct a test cross to all female offspring or 2) breed the female offspring to another unrelated normal (preferrably not dad). Personally I'd do the test cross with a Tremper albino male, BUT even if all of the offspring come out normal one can't assume those 4 females aren't still het. Reason being is a real life example of a test cross I did.

In 1999 or 2000 (I'd have to check photo time stamps) I purchased a pair of het Rainwater albino leos from Tim McBride for $1500. I paid Tim, at which point Tim Rainwater mailed me the geckos. This same dealing is where many people supposedly got screwed by Rainwater. I did not, at least with the female. I sold the male as a possible het if I recall correctly as I never bred him. Though looking back I should have kept him and bred him to a female RW albino.

In 2001 I purchased a male Rainwater albino from Kevin Hanley. I used him to test cross to my McBride via Rainwater female het in the spring of 2002. Those struggling to follow, I bred a Rainwater albino to a het Rainwater albino. Such cross should result statistically in the offspring outcome of a 1:1 ratio, 50% of the offspring should be albinos and the other 50% would be hets. This pairing resulted in 16 eggs. The LAST egg to hatch was an albino, all other 15 eggs hatched out normals. Talk about sweating bullets!

What I'm getting at is 1 out of 16 was albino. What if the above het tremper outcross, then offpsring test cross produced nothing but normals? You're already at year 2 when doing the test cross. If it were me and I got all normals from the first test cross I'd still run the test cross in year 3 based upon what I simply had happen with my Rainwaters. Even if you still toss normals, you now have to worry if any of the 4 females retained any sperm. This very concern is why I've not worked with the giant gene. The trait is linked to Moose and I have no way of knowing without a reason of doubt that any normal giant I purchase winds up secretly being het for Tremper. Even more disturbing is when asking eariler this year about some geckos available by some REALLY, REALLY REALLY large names in the leopard gecko community I got told:

She's not het for anything as far as I know, but with producing so many leopard geckos and crossing stuff for almost 20 years, there's always a chance any particular gecko will be het for other traits.

That slightly bugged me when I read that. I thought holy crap, even a large breeder isn't keeping track of their lineages. This is quite the contrary in the green tree python community, where someone could post an animal and it's id number and someone within that community would be able to trace that snake's lineage back to its greatgrandfather or further if possible.

Shoot, I just proved the same male Rainwater I test crossed in 2002 to be het for patternless not but about a week ago while attempting to create patternless rainwater albino double hets. I had no reason to suspect him to be het for patternless other than knowing that Rainwater himself had produced a patternless albino I believe within the first season of producing Max, the founder Rainwater albino.

I'm rambling at this point though. So in conclusion, genetics doesn't follow rules, it's all about probabilities, statistics, odds, luck, whatever you want to color it.
 
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