Opinions on Breeding

[Cazador]

Garterguy makes a good point about the power of the internet. There are several places to advertise your snakes, including on this website. This will be the first full year that this website has been on-line, so the "Classified" section should become a lot more active once spring rolls around.

Kitkat,
The offspring would certainly be double hets, but since both traits are recessive, each parent would only have genes to code for melanism or albinism. They wouldn't have genes to code for stripes. The melanistic parent has two genes (one from each of it's parents) both coding for dark skin because it isn't heterozygous. Similar situation for the albino parent. It's been a while, but I suspect that melanism is dominant over albinism. Any thoughts?

[KITKAT]

Kitkat,
The offspring would certainly be double hets, but since both traits are recessive, each parent would only have genes to code for melanism or albinism. They wouldn't have genes to code for stripes. The melanistic parent has two genes (one from each of it's parents) both coding for dark skin because it isn't heterozygous. Similar situation for the albino parent. It's been a while, but I suspect that melanism is dominant over albinism. Any thoughts?

I'll have to respectfully disagree there, Cazador. The allele for albino is not on the same locus as the allele for melanism. In mendelian code, it would look like this:

C = non-albino (color)
c = albino
M = non-melanistic (I made up this symbol as I do not know the correct letter to use for melanistic, but the process of mendelian law is the same)
m = melanistic

The genotype of the offspring would be CcMm and the phenotype (what you see is what you get) would be CM. Since wild garters are CM, you would have a "normal" that carried one copy of each of the recessive genes.

And melanistic is not technically dominant over albino, as melanistic is a seperate trait on another allele.

But that is a more technical, longer, and more complicated explanation.

So we will have to agree to disagree on this one.