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A Rich Z mistake? possible??

F

FlyinHerper

New member
Hey Genetics Guys,

I was on SerpenCo's site and I was looking at some of Rich's pictures. There was one :subject - "(9-23) there one in every crowd." It was a picture of lots of little charcoal ghosts with an hypo mixed in there. Check it out by going to Picture Gallery on SerpenCo. He also says in the picture that the parents were BOTH CHARCOAL GHOSTS, and that "you'd think you'd get all charcoal ghosts". How is it possible to get red hypo in the F-1 of two charcoal ghosts? hmmm, could Rich have messed up? :)
 
Possible causes for a hypo amidst a sea of charcoal ghosts:

1. Retained sperm from a previous year's mating
2. Spontaneous reversion to wild-type mutation on the part of the charcoal gene in that one animal
3. One of the males bred wasn't charcoal

All of these have various odds of happening, and when you work with as many snakes as Rich Z does (wasn't it something like 5000 hatchlings this year alone?), you're bound to see some hard to explain occurances.
 
Distant possibility #4: 2 Different hypos at work.

Didn't Rich say he had multiple types of hypos showing up that he hasn't straightened out yet?

Either way, that's what makes corns fun.
 
Hurley, if that were the case, the lone snake would be a charcoal rather than a ghost... not a hyporather than a ghost...

Dawn
 
Oops, yep, you're right.

I wasn't paying close enough attention and misread it.

Thanks for the catch.
 
The reason for posting that photo was exactly because that Hypo was an anomaly in that clutch. Both parents were Charcoal Ghosts.

This year I also bred Caramel Motley to Caramel Motley and a few of the babies were just Caramels. The Motley gene apparently dropped out of them.

And yes, I bred Crimson to Crimson and got normal colored Miami Phase and several instances.

Beats me what the heck is going on, but I certainly am not alone. At Daytona Beach I had quite a number of people confide in me that they were getting the same weird results. But they were afraid of making it public, fearing ridicule. And after seeing some scorchers on KINGSNAKE.COM, I can't say I blame them.

But this strange stuff IS happening. And at this point I have no clue what is going on. The best hypothesis I can come up with is that we ain't as smart as we think we are when it comes to genetics. IMHO.

If the facts dispute the theory, then the theory is faulty or incomplete.
 
Perhaps some of these genes are really very closely linked genes... together they cause the trait in question when the animal is homozygous at both alleles (that is gene x and gene y are very close together and are therefore inhereited together and act like one gene... gene xy. An animal needs 2 copies of the recessive xy (rather than say, the normal XY) to show the trait. Only an animal with 2 x's and 2 y's will show the trait). Because they're so close, they're not very likely to be inhereted seperately... but occasionally there will be a crossover between the genes during meiosis causing a xy xy parent to pass on a xx or yy (causing a resultant baby to be xx xy, or xy yy...and look normal (even more rarely, both parents may experience crossover, and a baby of xx yy would occur and have the trait, but would only pass on the trait if it TOO experienced crossover to form a new xy)).

It would happen very infrequently (would have to beat some high odds or produce a lot of corns to see it happen), but more often than spontaneous mutation or reverse mutation (reverse mutation being a reversion of the gene back to the wild-type).

Been awhile since I took linkage... anyone else who's familiar with linkage it care to verify if this theory could work (and maybe explain it more clearly than I can... hard to do without drawing pictures of chromosomes...)?

Dawn
 
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Thanks!

Hey guys,

Thanks so much for your reply. Rich, that's really strange that you (along with many other breeders) have gotten some of those crazy offspring. Do you think that the little hypo in that mess of charcoal ghosts is het anery? HE SHOULD BE :)
 
If the facts dispute the theory, then the theory is faulty or incomplete.
Click to expand...

When data doesn't match a well-established theory, I think it is also wise to examine the validity of the data. :)

I've heard all kinds of things that people thought were "weird and unexpected" and they generally are a result of the person not understanding the theory. Stuff like, "I bred a het to a mutant and out of 16 offspring I didn't get exactly half and half! Weird!"

But this strange stuff IS happening. And at this point I have no clue what is going on. The best hypothesis I can come up with is that we ain't as smart as we think we are when it comes to genetics. IMHO.
Click to expand...

I agree. At Daytona one of the "anomolies" I saw was snows het for amel. ;)

I beleive that some strange stuff is happening, it's necessary because that is also how we arrived at all these morphs to begin with. But I also believe that a lot of the cases where people assume strange stuff is happening have simpler explanations.

I'm sure a lot of cases can be explained by sperm retention. I had read about one case in a zoo where an animal had produced fertile eggs after something like 4 years of not being in contact with any males.

But there are also other possibilities...

For example, with the motley gene disappearing from motley parents, it's altogether possible that there is another unrelated gene which, when homozygous, disrupts the expression of motley and allows the normal pattern to form. Anti-motley?

It's also possible that there is a fourth "do nothing" allele in the motley locus that is recessive to all other alleles. If that is the case, then there may be some motleys out there that are actually het for Motley and "do nothing." Breeding two motleys together, if one or the other is heterozygous for this other allele, could result in offspring that are homozygous for the "do nothing" allele, and would appear normal.

Could be a polygenic influence stopping motley. (Or other traits)

Could be all kinds of things, but I don't think that a few cases of one thing or another is reason to assume that our entire understanding of process of inheritance, or of how certain traits work, should be thrown out the window, any more than it would be reasonable to immediately assume that the first lavender was expressing a simple-recessive trait until it was verified by more data. ;)

I think it would be important to make sure these anomolies get bred in specific experiments to try to figure out what actually is happening with them. Something is going on, that's for sure, but I'll bet that there won't be any new rules added to our understanding of inheritance based on any proof provided by further breedings.

If anything, it would prove that there are more genes out there which affect the phenotypes of cornsnakes and we didn't know about them. And in that case I think it's important to learn what they are.
 
I rest my case.......

I wonder how many times throughout the history of humanity that some scientist type has claimed that all that can be known, is known, and there is nothing more that can be discovered?

any more than it would be reasonable to immediately assume that the first lavender was expressing a simple-recessive trait until it was verified by more data.
Click to expand...

OK, I'll bite. Who did that?

Since I was the one whom hatched out the very first Lavender corn (originally called 'Mocha') back in 1985 and it wasn't until 1995 that I sold the very first ones out of my stock (because I was trying to prove what it actually was all that time), then where did you come up with this little gem of an analogy? :rolleyes:
 
Re: I rest my case.......

Originally posted by Rich Z I wonder how many times throughout the history of humanity that some scientist type has claimed that all that can be known, is known, and there is nothing more that can be discovered?
Click to expand...
I haven't said that all is known. I'm saying that I think what we don't know in these cases are not the rules of inheritance, but what exactly it is that is being inherited.

OK, I'll bite. Who did that?

Since I was the one whom hatched out the very first Lavender corn (originally called 'Mocha') back in 1985 and it wasn't until 1995 that I sold the very first ones out of my stock (because I was trying to prove what it actually was all that time), then where did you come up with this little gem of an analogy? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Nobody did that, because it would be foolsih to do so without any kind of evidence. Just as it would be foolish to assume that the whole set of rules, established through piles and piles of experimental data, should be dismissed as soon as one experiment doesn't match the expected results.

The point I was making was that you spent a lot of time and effort in gathering data to prove that Lavender was what you thought it was. You didn't instantly believe it was a simple recessive. You probably didn't even feel "reasonably sure" about it until you had seen the results of quite a few breedings. If I were to breed two lavenders together and get a non-lavender, should we all instantly assume that the whole "lavender" thing is BS?

We are breeding corns which have thousands of genes, and we only know what about a dozen of those genes do. The lack of knowledge is not in how these genes are passed down, including mutations and exceptions and anomolies. The vast vast majority of our ignorance is in the thousands of cornsnake genes that could do all kinds of things, and that's where I think we should be looking.
 
Hey Serp,

Maybe I'm missing something here, but you wrote:

"It's also possible that there is a fourth "do nothing" allele in the motley locus that is recessive to all other alleles. If that is the case, then there may be some motleys out there that are actually het for Motley and "do nothing." Breeding two motleys together, if one or the other is heterozygous for this other allele, could result in offspring that are homozygous for the "do nothing" allele, and would appear normal."

Just for the sake of argument, if this "do nothing"allele were recessive to the other alleles, wouldn't BOTH parents have to be het for this in order for the trait (or lack thereof) to show up in homozygous "do nothing" offspring? Am I off base here in some way?

:confused:
 
Ya, I had too many things going through my brain at the same time. Since it's recessive it would require two het parents to express, of course. :)
 
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