How do new morphs come along?

[justin-branam]

This may seem like a silly question, but i am very interested in how new morphs just happen to pop up, and haven't seen it answered anywhere. Is it just the luck of the draw, DNA getting mixed up or what? i can understand how the line-bred morphs are made, but dont quite understand the genetics behind new morphs (the "enigma" for example). if someone could give me a 5 year olds explanation so i could understand it i would appretiate it!

 

[Intense Herpetoculture]

Just like everything in nature, the rules are made to be broken. Something goes wrong in the animals genes and an abberant animal is born.

 

[justin-branam]

Just like everything in nature, the rules are made to be broken. Something goes wrong in the animals genes and an abberant animal is born.

so to a point, it is just a luck of the draw as to who gets ths first of a new morph? im sure it helps to be breeding certain mophs together, and to do it on a large scale, but still just luck then.

 

[Scott&Nikki]

so to a point, it is just a luck of the draw as to who gets ths first of a new morph? im sure it helps to be breeding certain mophs together, and to do it on a large scale, but still just luck then.

It is luck, but also choice of breeders. For example, I mentioned once before that The Windy City Gecko is attempting to create a blue leo. To do this they are trying to breed leos that have the most blue on them. They hope that generation to generation the blue increases and eventually can take over the majority of the body. It is the same with dogs. All dogs were the regular wolf and through selective breeding, we have hundreds of species of dog. Selective breeding is the key.

 

[LeosForLess]

I think hes talking about recessives and doms and stuff. You either find ones het for it in the wild. or you produice 2342384023948208 geckos a year (the bells) and get a bell albino and an enigma

 

[Lottiz]

You can say -mutations is luck but line bred and selective breeding in hard work.
But you can also give the nature a helping hand by breeding recessive morphs to each other and save heterozygots to inbreed. Some times something can pop up. Some times not...

 

[Sandra]

You should separate the different things that people call 'morphs', because that is the main cause of confusion in this topic. My criteria is:

-Mutation: Change in the genetic material of a gecko, that is hereditary to the offspring. These are the kind of morphs that you just get by chance between your collection or capturing them from the wild. Mutations appear randomly.

-Selection: You get a gecko with a characteristic you want to reproduce or improve and selectively breed it until you get the desired result. This is, of course, intentional.

-Combos: Once you have a selection or mutation, you breed them together with other different selections or mutations to obtain new results. Many of this kind of morphs are presented as brand new morphs and the fact that are combinations is not stated, which leads to confusion of many people.

Non-hereditary traits: Traits that appear randomly without any kind of selection but are not necessarily hereditary, like zig-zag patterns or 'four-eyes' head markings...

 

[Intense Herpetoculture]

Clearly these are hereditary traits, just far more complex then most traits we work with.

Non-hereditary traits: Traits that appear randomly without any kind of selection but are not necessarily hereditary, like zig-zag patterns or 'four-eyes' head markings...

 

[Sandra]

Clearly these are hereditary traits, just far more complex then most traits we work with.

Well, all traits are hereditary in some way, even line-bred ones or (aparently) random ones, if not, we wouldn't be able to get geckos that looked similar to their parents. As you said, they are just too complex, maybe I should have labeled them as 'random traits' or something like that, because they can, of course, be passed down. Sorry for that

 

[Scott&Nikki]

Lol, I think we will let it go Sandra. Thanks for the clarification. I got confused before and apparently didn't answer the question being asked lol.

 

[justin-branam]

-Mutation: Change in the genetic material of a gecko, that is hereditary to the offspring. These are the kind of morphs that you just get by chance between your collection or capturing them from the wild. Mutations appear randomly.

-Selection: You get a gecko with a characteristic you want to reproduce or improve and selectively breed it until you get the desired result. This is, of course, intentional.

this is kind of what i was looking for. like i said, i understand how line breeding works. the snows for example, you have line bred snows, and then the mack snows. the macks are a dom trait, but how exactly did it pop up all of the sudden. i think it has been explained to me for the most part. thanks all!:main_thumbsup: