hoho19 said:
I was using the program "Micks Cornsnake Progeny Predictor" to determine which snake I wanted to get in julyish.
I currently have a male charcoal het bloodred. I was under the impression that if I were to purchase an amel female and mate them (at some point) the offspring would be 100% blizzard.
Maybe I'm off or the program is off but the program tells me that I would recieve 50% het blizzard het bloodred and 50% het blizzard. Now i can understand this completely.
The program however doesn't have a check box for het blizzard so I set it up for het amel het charcoal female X het amel het charcoal male. It gives me the outcome of:
25% het blizzard, 12.5% charcoal, 12.5% amel, 12% het charcoal, 12.5% het amel, 6.25% blizzard etc..
I'm a little confuzzled.
Thanks
Chris
Carol did a good job, but I just wanted to add some things to it.
(Do you all see why I simply loathe these 'het for blizzard', 'het for butter', etc terms?)
Chris,
We'll start at the beginning here. Each snakes is comprised of two sets of genes, with each set coming from one parent. That's simple and easy to understand. I think I see where you're going wrong, so I'll try to address this.
I'm going to use the one snake you have in question right now, which is the Charcoal het bloodred.
I'm going to write this out as this: ch= charcoal, d= bloodred
So, your male has this genetic makeup: chchDd
Others use + and superscripts, but I just find this easier to work with while explaning something.
So, since your male is homozygous for charcoal, it will automatically give the charcoal gene to all of it's offspring. This is the case for all snakes that are homozygous for any particular trait. However, your snake is also heterozygous for bloodred. This means that statistically 50% of the time it will give the bloodred gene, and 50% of the time it will not.
Here is what your male can throw: chD, chd
Now, to your question about mating him to an amelanistic female.
Since the amelanistic female is homozygous for amel and has no known hets, all she can give is one amel gene, represented by (a).
Now, in order to express any trait (except co-doms, but don't worry about that) a snake must posess both copies of that gene. You asked why these offspring from Charcoal het bloodred x amel would not give you any blizzards, this is why.
The possible outcomes from that pairing are this:
1) chDDAa, 2) chDdAa
---or----
1) Normal het charcoal, amel
2) Normal het charcoal, bloodred, amel
The reason is because the amel does not have the charcoal gene present. Blizzard is a double homozygous combo of amelanistic and charcoal. Both of these genes must be expressed in the snake for it to be a blizzard.
I think you might be thinking that charcoal x amel = blizzard, but it does not. Again, it all goes back to the fact that each parent can only give one half of it's genetic makeup to it's offspring. For example, the charcoal male cannot give two copies of charcoal to it's offspring, but only 1.
If you want blizzards, you're plum out of luck for the F1 generation. However, if you found an amel and paired your charcoal male with her and kept the babies, you'd have a good range of possibilites.
Normal het charcoal, amel x Normal het charcoal amel =
3/16 charcoals
3/16 amels
1/16 blizzards
You'd also have normals het amel, normals het charcoal, and normals het 'blizzard' (ie charcoal and amel).
Some of the charcoals would be het amel and some of the amels would be het charcoal.
In the future when you're trying to do a cross, it's best to know the makeup of each morph so you're not looking for 'het blizzard', because that's technically incorrect. There was a sizeable debate on this, but knowing that het blizzard really means het charcoal and amel will help you out a lot.
Here is a link to my genetics FAQ that will hopefully be done in a week or two, and as Carol said you should also check out Chuck's genetics tutorial. If you have any questions, feel free to PM me or post in the thread.
Genetics FAQ
