#goldpilot22

No brain freeze, no POTS

Yes brain freeze, no POTS

No brain freeze, yes POTS

Yes brain freeze, yes POTS

Not an ice cream eater/nuance button/see results

[ID: a picture of King in their Tales design. They’re pale, have an undercut, and their blonde hair is slicked back. King has a very light scar on their right eyebrow. They’re wearing their usual Hyperion sweater that’s far too big for them, and have a long, dark blue glove on their left hand with neon blue accents. King is also wearing thick square glasses. King looks bored as they look up at the question above. End ID]

Oh fuck how long has this been in my inbox????????? Sorry lol

So, first some background. Corn snakes apparently love to create hypomelanistic traits. Hypomelanism means ‘reduced black pigment’ so instead of black you get charcoal, chocolate, gray, tan, and sometimes almost purple-grays. There are currently 6 known hypomelanistic traits in corns that are not allelic to each other, and there are 8 if we do count the alleles. These are: Hypo a (the first found), sunkissed (also changes the pattern), ultra/ultramel (of hybrid origin and allelic to amel), lava (tends to be pretty purple-grays, and almost amelanistic-looking eyes), dilute (makes ‘em look perpetually in shed almost), and peach (the only one that is not recessive).

As reptiles are not generally negatively affected by a single generation of inbreeding, and it’s a good way to cement a trait before outcrossing, Mystery’s dad is also her grandfather, Eugene.

Eugene was bred initially to Torandre, my ghost het amel. Eugene is an anery. A ghost is created from the combination of hypo type a and anery. I bred them 2 years in a row and got 38 babies total. Out of those 38 babies I got exactly zero showing any sort of hypomelanism.

The probably of an animal that is het for hypo a producing zero hypo babies out of 38 eggs with a homozygous hypo a animal is.... 0.0000000003638%

Now, ultra is allelic to amel and the ghost is het for amel. The odds of an animal het ultra producing no hypo-type babies when paired to an animal het for amel and having 38 eggs is definitely better than the het to homozygous probability. Now it’s 0.001788% 

So, Eugene is effectively shown to be not het for hypo, and not het for ultra.

Now we fast forward to this year, and he is bred back to his daughter Ms. Moose. I get 13 eggs. Out of these eggs, 3 are visually hypomelanistic. They are not peach, for peach is incomplete dominant and neither parent is peach. They are not sunkissed, because sunkissed also changes the pattern in distinctive ways that these babies lack.

This leaves me with 3 options.

1- They are het for lava, a very uncommon gene. These babies do not match for what a baby ice looks like, and they do not have the red pupils and light eyes of a lava. This option is actually the least likely.

2- They are het for dilute, an even more uncommon gene. These babies are darker than what you usually see,  but they shed completely clear, a trait that is shared by most dilutes. This option is the most likely by far.