Quote Originally Posted by BLUESIRTALIS View Post
I like them! I only have a few plains garters that I'm working with at the moment and the anery and blue axanthic are my favorites!
From Jeff Benfer's website: "The axanthic gene has not been completely well characterized or documented, but it has long been suspected that the axanthic gene and the anerythristic gene are co-allelic to each other. That is the two mutations are different alleles or slightly different mutations yet exist at the same loci or location on a gene. Thus, an axanthic phenotype is actually genotypically one copy axanthic gene and one copy anerythristic gene. Two copies of the anerythristic gene which is recessive, yields the anerthristic phenotype, a very dark almost solid black snake. However, two copies of the axanthic gene does not yield a phenotypic axanthic snake. Only when a snake inherits one copy of the axanthic gene and one copy of the anerythristic gene does the axanthic phenotype manifest itself as a black and blue snake."

In other words, the visual blue axanthics are actually double hets for axanthic and anery.