Question about "designer" morphs?

[KDesautels08]

Hello all,

I have just finished my first season of breeding Leopard geckos, I have a good knowledge of morphs and genetics. However an area that I am still a little confused on is the area of the "designer" leopard geckos.

I know how to breed the animals and I know the basics of genetics, however I am constantly seeing these beautiful stripe/reverse stripe/Carrot Head/Carrot tail animals, and I can't help but wonder how these animals come about.

any help would be appreciated.

 

[Neon Aurora]

Designer geckos are generally created by line breeding. For example, to get carrothead, you would find two geckos that might have a bit of orange on their heads and breed them together. Then you take the offspring with the most orange on their heads and breed them. You keep selecting the offspring with the most orange on the head and you get better and better carrot heads with each season. Line-breeding takes a lot more time and effort and also produces many, many geckos as "by-products" (I hate describing animals that way, but they are the less desirable looking ones from this sort of project). Normally small scale breeders will get geckos from big breeder's lines and use them in their projects. It takes huge facilities and having a really good market (because you will have so many extras that did not have the most desirable phenotype) to be able to produce your own unique line of geckos. That's not to say us small scale breeders can't dabble. I'm currently working on a project to produce some great looking red stripe/stripe rainwater albinos using a male from the raining redstripe lines. They won't be my line or anything, but it will still be really fun and some awesome geckos will come out of it.

 

[Kristi23]

"Designer" is an old term similar to "fancy" with leopard geckos. Basically anything besides a normal would fall under those terms. I still see them being used by pet stores and wholesalers to sell animals that are not normals.

Basically you want to learn about leopard geckos morphs and genetics. Line bred animals like tangerine carrot tails are produced by taking the nicest examples and breeding together year after year. If you breed a tangerine to a non tangerine, you will still get some babies with the tang color, but it will be washed out. Other morphs are only expressed by breeding two visual or two het animals together. Any morph can be line bred, too. I line breed my eclipse projects (they are recessive genes) to get more orange and carrot tail with them.

There is a pinned post above with a link to geckoboa's genetics page that has some of the best information out there.