I think it goes on a personal basis. It’s very cool you’re keeping track of that, even if it’s just for your own record. I personally don’t like dealing with hets at all, and swore against having ANY in my collection. Now I have, I think, 5 and it stresses me tf out 
People who deal with 66%, 50%, 33% hets are gods
Haha, i feel you, they are cant wait to have all my recessives homozygous and not need to deal with hets haha, but for the combos i want, they are a necessary evil xD
Yeah people will debate about anything lol. I have some 33% het Clowns that I produced and I would be surprised if some of them didn’t prove out. Their dad was a Super Pastel 66% het Clown, but I’m almost certain that he would have proved out if I had paired him to a visual or het Clown.
Best of luck with that! I dont get it, youd think the more info the better, as its just being honest about the possibilities and giving people all the info they need to make a informed decision. Lets say i was breeding axanthic and didnt want albino because it changes the look so much and makes the axanthic redundant, i would be upset to have hidden genes pop up later, but if i knew of the possibility, it wouldnt be so bad since i could plan for it to prevent any oopsies haha.
Some people, like me, really enjoy keeping very detailed records of genetics (and everything else). Some folks don’t, and those people either need to suck it up and do it anyway, or they should not be breeding reptiles. Keeping detailed and accurate records (and providing that info to customers) is not a matter of personal preference, but is a responsibility that is incumbent upon anyone breeding animals.
The confussion i have is that some refuse to even accept that 25% or 33% (and the factors thereafter) exist in the first place. And i dont just mean people who dont understand how math works, but some people who are very experienced and knowledgeable feel that way as well. The argument used was that 66 and 50% can exist, since you know one or both of the parents were het, but when you go to 25% and 33% you dont know if the parent(s) were het. But they completely ignore the fact that you DO know that the grandparent(s) were het, meaning you can use a probability path just fine then use punnett squares on each possibility to determine the overall odds of each result. Instead the explanation they use is a questionmark since you dont know, which a punnet square doesnt work that way, you have to do a square for each possible result, the. Calculate the posibilities and add them up after doing a square for each probability.
If it were as simple as people just not wanting to do it, i could understand that, i personally choose to do it becsuse it will help me keep my lines cleaner and let me give the buyer a more accurate detailrd description if what they are getting, but i can understand personal choice, but to go after those who do and saying it doesnt exist confuses me.
Well said! I disagree with the person who claimed that only 66% and 50% hets are the only that can exist because the statistical odds begin and end at that initial breeding. That’s just not true. All hets are binary, and the percentage attached is the mathematical probability of them carrying the allele, which I believe is well worth keeping track of. I would also want to know this possible het status as a buyer, as a hidden het may reveal itself unexpected and cause much confusion down the line.
I am a physician. I have dealt with diseases that are inherited in mendelian fashions in humans, such as cystic fybrosis which is an autosomal recessive disease, analogous to a recessive trait in a snake. We sometimes have had to counsel patients if they are family planning. Say a patient comes in who had a great-grandfather with cystic fibrosis (CF actually affects fertility, but still works for this example) and wants to have a child with a woman who’s mother has cystic fibrosis. We know the potential mother is 100% het for CF, so how should we handle the male patient? Well, the patient’s grandfather must be 100% het as well and therefore, the father is 50% het and the son (our patient) is 25% het. So, there is a 12.5% chance of him passing the CF allele to his child and a 50% chance of the child getting the CF allele from the mother, so his probability of having a child with the disease is 6.25%. Clearly this is very important to know and how it was done in practice (if lucky enough to have such a detailed family history) and taught in medical schools. Snake traits are no different. Nowadays we have genetic testing which removes all the guesswork.
I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but my point is, you should keep track of possible het status. It can go lower than 50%. Want to prove him wrong? Raise up some 33% hets and breed them to a visual. I guarantee you that you’ll eventually get some visuals if you have enough 33% hets to hit the odds.
Thamks for the input! It is incredibly useful to know that this is something used in the medical field! My way of doing it was purely mathmatical on how i believed it should work, so knowing there are professional applications that do it the same way is very reassuring that i havent made a mistake of some kind 
I didn’t read through this entire thread thoroughly but wanted to add my 2 cents.
While it’s fine and logical for personal records I don’t agree with using “33%” het etc terminology to market. If the 50% or 66% possible het parent doesn’t prove out to be a het then those offspring are actually 0% possible het, no chance. While you’re technically correct that an unproven possible het can produce offspring that might be hets, and there’s a percentage to represent that, in this hobby when we label it as possible het it is implied that one or both the parents are for sure heterozygous. If we label it 33% (or less) unsuspecting buyers might assume there’s a 33% chance they’re hets and that’s not the case, there’s either 0% chance or 50%/66%.
I sold a lavender albino het pied that fell in this category. One of the parents was an unproven possible het G stripe. I mentioned this in the description and the way I phrased it was “If the mother of this animal proves out to be a het G stripe then he is 50% possible het G stripe as well”. This way the buyer knows the potential is there while not misleading by throwing out an inaccurate potential probability statistic.
Regardless of the marketing standpoint I would definitely keep track of such potential for personal records. There have been numerous cases of recessive mutations unsuspectingly popping up into collections. For example, Billy from Mutation Creation had it occur a cutting edge morph, Monsoons, which was amazing for him.
I agree with you in a marketing standpoint it shouldnt be used, but i disagree with the 0% arguement. If a 50% or 66% doesnt prove, they are also 0%, so the 0% arguement could also be used for them too. A 50% means 1 parent was het, a 66% means bother were het, a 25% means 1 grandparent was het, a 33% would mean 2 grand parents were het (I dont feel like mathing for the other side, but this technically goes up if the other grand parents are het). My point being, just because you move down the generations, doesnt make the percentage any less viable. The chance is exactly as is stated. Now, as you prove out animals, the percentage absolutely changes, but not everyone is going to risk producing normals to see if an animal is het, and because of this, buyers may end up with unwanted or unintended morphs later down the road. I feel its important information for both the buyer and the breeder to know, but i also agree that the odds after 50% are so low that they dont warrant a price hike. It should be mentioned for the buyers information if they want to use it in their breeding plans, and not as a marketable thing.
I think, from a marketing standpoint, it’s implied that the probability is defined by going only a single generation back. I think you’re right in that people not keeping more accurate records there’s many recessive genes floating around that they have no knowledge of. Better record keeping and communication would be helpful to alleviate that issue, the more information the better!
But considering a het to normal scenario. There’s a legitimate 50% chance all the offspring could be carrying the gene. When you push forward another generation of potential het to normal there’s either no chance or a 50%. With the first generation the “no chance” doesn’t come into play. That’s the difference I think.
I see your logic but I’m going to disagree.
This is true, if the parent is 50% het then it either is or isn’t het. If it is het then the offspring will be 50% het. If it isn’t het the offspring will be 0% het. Since we don’t know it’s the average, 25%.
I agree that a 25% shouldn’t be labeled as pos het as a benefit but the buyer should be aware that the animal has a 25% chance of being het.
But thats the issue, you say “legitimate 50% chance”. You add erroneous factors into an equation that already accounts for the chance the parents arent het. Without factoring probability, there are 2 options: 100% het and 0% het. When you allow for probabilities you recognize that when there is an unknown, you can only display it with probabilities. When you do this a 66% probability is no more valid than a 33% probability. 33% het means there is a 33% chance of it being het, but conversely it also means there is a 66% chance that it is not. This percentage accounts for the probabilities of the previous generation and the chance for the het not proving out. It is no different than 50 or 66% het, it is just further away from the 100% and thus less likely to be het. But how the probabilities are calculated does not change the farther away from the known het you get, they just become less and less favorable.
I could show this with a probability chart and punnett squares if it would help clarify what im saying. But the jist if it is that it is wrong to call a 33% chance any less valid or accurate than a 66% chance. The reason the % goes down is specifically because of the chance the gen before may not be het, that chance of non het doesnt invalidate it until it is proven one way or another.
I get where you’re coming from but I think it boils down to this:
First generation there is no possible scenario for there to be 0% probability. The next generation out introduces the potential for a 0% probability because the parent has the possibility of not proving out. That possibility does not exist in the first generation due to one or both parents being a het.
But the first gen does have a chance for 0%. For 66% the chance for 0% is 33% and for 50% the chance for 0% is 50%. To me, the arguement looks like this (I am not trying to be insulting, I really appreciate you discussing this with me in a well mannered and reasonable manner) : 33% and 25% chance cant exist because the 66% chance and 50% chance before it may actually be 0%, and the fact that the 66% amd 50% chance can be 0% doesnt matter because the immediate parent makes its 0% better than the 0% of the following gen if it doesnt prove.
In my eyes 0% is 0%. Anything less than 100% has a chance to not be het, and the percentage going down directly reflects the chance of the gen before it not being het. It doesnt mean 33% or 25% or any lower percent doesnt exist, it just means they have a higher chance of not being het because the known het is farther away :).
All of that being said, ive got no issue with people that dont like using them, I just take offense that some people will attack those that do use 33% and 25% claiming they “dont exist” when it is easily provable that they do. I agree the chance of failure is much higher proportional to the parents het status not being known, but it isnt a question mark, its an easily calculated and displayed chance that updated as better data is aquired. Just as the 66% or 50% would update once it is proven or not. At the end of the day, all PH animals are actually either 100% or 0%, everything past that is an equation of probability
You’re not insulting at all, no worries!
I think you’re thinking of the idea of statistical probabilities incorrectly. Think of it like rolling a dice. In a het to normal pairing you’re rolling a single dice with 50% of the sides expressing the mutation and the other 50% expressing normal. When you go one more generation out you would need to roll two dice to represent the two potential scenarios. One dice would represent the parent proving to be het and would be identical to the dice in the first generation, another dice would represent if the parent did not prove to be het and all sides would be normal in that scenario representing 0% chance of the mutation. That second dice doesn’t come into play whatsoever in the first generation while it does in the second with an unproven parent. The first generation has one scenario with statistical probabilities equaling 50%, the second generation has two possible scenarios with statistical probabilities being 0% in one and 50% in the other. While you are correct that an animal is either heterozygous or it’s not, the statistical probability of it being so remains 50% when one parent is het.
I understand what you are saying, but i believe a coin would be more accurate. When you flip a coin, the odds are 50/50. Now the flip after that is also 50/50 and so on and so forth. Now, lets say heads is het and normal is tails, lets also agree that you can only flip the coin if the flip before it was heads. Now the probability isnt trying to figure out what the probability of the third coin flip is. We know it is 50/50. Instead, what we are actually trying to figure out is what are the chances of there even being a third coin flip. To reach a third coin flip, the 2 coins before it MUST land on heads. So to figure this out, you multiply the 2 probabilities together. 50% X 50% = 25%. So if i were asking for the results of the third coin flip, you are right, the results would be 50/50 just as it always was, but we are seeing if we even reach that flip, thats where the odds of probability diminish, and the results of each prior coin flip increase or decrease those odds.
I’m not sure how accurate my example is but it’s easier for me to understand. You have two coins, a dime and a quarter. The flip of the dime is the second generation inheriting the het (50% het) and the flip of the quarter is the third generation inheriting the het. Heads is het and tails is normal. There are four equally likely possibilities DT QT___DT QH___DH QT___DH QH. If the dime is tails then the quarter has to be tails. Now it’s DT QT___DT QT___DH QT___DH QH. The chances of the quarter being heads is 25%, one out of the four equally possible combinations. This represents the chance of the third generation being het, 25%. So there’s a 25% chance the third generation is het which can be called 25% pos het.
Took me a bit to process that haha, but it is a good example, as it factors in the variable of the immediate parent by requiring the dime to be heads in order for the quarter result to count as heads. I believe the main disconnect we are having discussing this is which probability we are focusing on. The odds of a known het making a het, and the odds of a snake further down being het. These are two different probabilities. The only time they match is in the first gen where the odds of producing a het are the same as the odds of the generation in question being het.