As everyone here knows, I do not frequent forums as much as I’d should. Uhhh, well, actually, I almost never do, but I really wish I could. I built SMR up to a point that precludes my involvement in these crucial forums where great quantities of information are shared. I hope to be more involved in the future, but today I felt the need to correct some mistakes.
I wrote to Walter privately because I do not abide public arguments like this one. I asked him to amend some of his statements – to more accurately describe the history of this morph. Pied-sided bloods are one of the most genetically perplexing of all the morphs, but then again, they’re bloods. What isn’t perplexing about bloods?
Here is the sequence of events that led to the RE-production of the mutation we know as Pied-Sided Bloodreds:
Some years ago, Walter called to ask if I had any adult female bloodreds with white on their sides. I had one, but explained that if he was trying to reproduce the look, he may be wasting his time. Since I’d seen several bloodreds over the years that exhibited some white laterally, I presumed it was polygenic or anomalous, and not reproducible in Mendelian fashion. When he asked if I’d ever tried to reproduce the look, I shocked myself by admitting that I had not. Hence, I sent my female to him. She had a fraction of the ventral-lateral white his McDonald male did. Walter bred them, and at the end of the season, sent seven babies along with the adult female. I kept 3.2 of them, and two years later, bred two pairs of siblings and paired the adult female with one of her sons. I don’t have the data in reach right now, but approximately 50% of each brood was what I later called Pied-sided. Some were striking examples with a great deal of lateral white, but the majority of them ranked in the medium white expression category – relative to the highest white ones.
At that time, I called Rob to find out what he produced from this line, since he had purchased most (or all) of Walter’s corns prior to that. He reported that he had produced many beautiful bloods from them, but none had white on their sides. He said he had bred all (or most) back to their father – the original male McDonald bloodred with so much white on the sides.
Shortly thereafter, all three of us were talking at Rob’s table at the Daytona Expo, and Walter shocked us by saying that he had not kept any of the F1s, and therefore production results were not revealing – in the realm of the heritability of the McDonald “trait”. Rob was as shocked as I was, because in lieu of Walter saying anything to the contrary, we incorrectly presumed that the females he got from Walter were from that original SMR x McDonald pairing. You can read in Rob Steven’s post on this thread what results were attained.
I fear that some of Walter’s initial remarks were incomplete, if not completely misleading. He states that he is the originator of this line. If Walter is the originator of this line, it is only because he borrowed my snake that already had one copy (or two) of the gene responsible for the white on the sides of my pied-sided bloods. In other words, when I reproduced p/s babies from F1 sibling to sibling pairings, and from breeding one of the F1 males back to the original SMR dam, it demonstrated that IF the white is a product of a recessive mutation, my female was responsible for the “look” of this morph. Of course, it does not speak to the origin or heritability of the white that is exhibited on the McDonald F1 male, so observations made on this thread that both could be non-allelic mutations is feasible. The conundrum is that until Walter bred one of my p/s males to a McDonald female in 2009, there was more negative white-sided promotion from the McDonald line than positive. IF both of those original partners (the SMR female with little white and the McDonald male with much white) were non-allelic carriers of similar traits, it explains how Walter produced four p/s bloods from the 2009 pairing of my F2 male to a female McDonald p/s blood. To me, it does not demonstrate that the two lines are alleles of the same locus (as evidenced by the absence of any mutants among the F1s), but since the F2 SMR male Walter used in 2009 on the male McDonald p/s blood was a product of F1s from the McDonald male and SMR female, it may only demonstrate that the SMR male he used in 2009 was het for the McDonald trait (if indeed that “trait” is recessive in heritable fashion). My point is that some people wrote or called last night and today to say that they inferred from Walter’s statement [Back in the 90's I started the Pied-Sided Bloodred project that is responsible for the (SMR) Pied-Sided Bloodreds that are out there now and it actually started with a Pied-Sided Bloodred male that I aquired from Brad McDonald.] that my p/s line would not exist if not for him breeding my p/s female to the McDonald male. As you can see, if I had kept back babies from any of her previous seven years of production, I’d have discovered the “mutation?” without the McDonald male. In fact, the greatest tragedy in all this is the confusion caused by the non-allelic “similarity” between the original animals. Hence, his comment that the McDonald partner of the original pairing being “responsible” for the (SMR) Pied-Sided Bloodreds is totally false. I tried to explain this to Walter via private emails last night, but realized that it doesn’t matter how he perceives this. What matters are the facts. We each draw our own conclusions from such data. I don’t wish to engage in debate over which morph is better or more productive than the other, but wanted everyone to know the events surrounding this morph, and to correct some mistakes in Walter’s version of the Pied-Sided Bloodred history.
Maybe if I drop by for a visit someday...
