What are the Dos and Don'ts of Test Breeding for hets?

[russe306]

I have a nice high speckled Mack Snow female that I received from a person who bought her from JMG Reptile. Unfortunately he did not pass along the possible hets she could have.

I've bred her once to my Super Snow het Tremper and she produced a super snow Tremper albino.

I would like to use her in the future for breeding but I want to test for hets first. What are the accepted practices for testing breeding? Is line breeding ok or is buying pure geckos to test with the more accepted form?

Picture of female in question attached. Lighting was poor so her color is not that dark.

 

[acpart]

I guess you know now that the gecko is het Tremper. I don't think there are any hard and fast rules. The biggest issue to keep in mind is the possibility of multiple albino strain hets. The problem is that if you test-breed to different albino strains and one or more works out, you've now created offspring with multiple albino hets. Since you now know that the gecko is het for Tremper and since the gecko came from JMG, though there's no 100% guarantee, it's not likely that a JMG gecko will be het for multiple albino strains. The level of speckling suggests to me that the gecko could possibly be het for blizzard or Murphy's patternless. You could consider breeding it to one or the other. Do one at a time. It's open to opinion as to how many offspring that don't display the trait it takes to determine that the het doesn't exist. I'd say, offhand, 10 maximum. If blizzard doesn't show het trait, try the patternless.

Aliza