Absolutely sean bradley showed it plain as day in some of his pairings when he was in the hobby, can easily see normals, blades, clowns and blade clowns. Later on people went farther and made super blades and super blade clowns. I’m surprised someone would even make such a claim. Blade as far as we can tell originated in BHBs clowns. Sean bought them and bred them as a reduced line of clown, later discovering is was a separate gene all together.
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Oh definitely, I have a gorgeous blade het clown who is clearly not a normal. I can’t guarantee I’d be able to pick blade out of a lineup of morphs that are similar to normals but aren’t, but she definitely looks different.
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I just marvel and sit back and watch the discussion of genetics while the only credentials I have is highschool biology under my belt 
. But seriously though, thank you for putting in the very long responses to educate people such as myself.
Edit: Gotta thank @chesterhf as well for putting in the effort of sharing info too!
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Ugh. Ugh I tell you! LOL
If I get enough of a head of steam about me I can see about trying to draft it all up. In the interim, it might just be easier to direct you back to my visit to either Reptile Gumbo podcast or Morelia Python Radio podcast.
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Nope, Spider and Pied are totally different genes, not alleles. What we see there is synergy
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Genetic
Reduced
Pattern
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Again I tell you - UGH!
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Then I am confused because I got the impression you were saying we can only determine inc-dom in an animal that is fully wild-type other than being het for the gene in question while I am saying it does not matter if there are zero other morphs or fifteen other morphs. So it seemed to me that we were on two different wavelengths
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I do not, and never have, worked with eitherthese morphs so I cannot ante in on them from a personal side. However, at least with Hypo, I would not be at all surprised
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What do you mean Lesser and Fire are not expressed in the heterozygous form?? Lesser or Fire are the heterozygous form…
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That’s a strange way of saying " I love it when you ask me lots of questions" 
Funnily enough, that is where I was heading today. I’m hunting you down online and making a playlist of all your podcasts and interviews. I actually have the Reptile Gumbo podcast saved to my homepage as I had wanted to relisten to it and note down a ton of questions I had the first time through (bet you can’t wait 
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Do we have examples of Co-dom in the hobby?
So I am happy I now know a new term, but also sad at the amount of time I spent reading about gastrin-releasing peptide and wondering how that linked into the conversation 
Your welcome 
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Oh, I appreciate the questions… I just only have so many hours in the day LOL
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If it helps, I think I have all of them saved on my IG stories profile under ‘Podcasts’
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I was on there twice… Cannot remember which one I discussed the co-dom thing
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Nope
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I didn’t read it that way and imo that just makes classification muddy as can be. So if that’s the case pied clown and hypo are inc-dom and probably many more.
Lesser paired with bamboo or fire paired with lemon back doesn’t express anymore than albino paired with normal.
Super lesser potential bugs eyes
Lesser bamboo no reports of bugs eyes
Super bamboo no reports of bug eyes
Super fire yellow splotches normally
Lemon back fire white snake
Super lemonback white snake
Albino looks albino
Het albino normal looks normal
Normal looks normal
However pair a lesser/fire with normal it expresses but pair a candy and albino and it also expresses.
So the only difference I’m seeing is the relation to normal.
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The reasoning behind it is straight forward, I just think it makes educating most of the hobby up to the right level particularly difficult
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You are doing an apples to oranges here. A dominant-negative effect to a loss-of-function
The reason you see the bias toward the stronger expression mutant in the heteroallelic super when dealing with a dominant-negative is because of the lack of any ability to recover functionality.
This differs from a loss of function mutation because any allele that is not an absolute loss of function is capable of providing a degree of recovery
Not the greatest analogy (but the best I can come up with on the fly here):
The Fire/Lemonback-type relationship is the difference between removing the tires from the wheels of a car (Fire) and removing the wheels entirely (Lemonback). You take all the tires off the wheels (SuperFire) and a car might still be driveable, or it might not (splotchy SuperFire versus all-white SuperFire). You take all the wheels off a car (SuperLemonback) and it is not going to be driveable. You take the tires off two wheels and totally remove the other two wheels (Fire/Lemonback heteroallelic super) and the car is not going to be driveable.
The WT/Candy/Albino-type relationship is more like two guys painting a wall with airbrushes. If the air line to one guy’s brush totally fails (total loss of function; het Albino) whereas the other guy’s brush works at about 10% (partial loss of function; het Candy) then the wall will still get a partial coating of paint
How these two mutation types differ is in relation to the WT allele for each:
Remove two tires (Fire) or two wheels (Lemonback) while leaving the other two alone (WT), your car may drive, but it is not going to do it well. The effect of the mutation is negative and it dominates over the WT.
Break one airbrush (het Albino or het Candy) but leave the other fully functional and the wall still gets fully painted. The effect of the mutation is unnoticed because the WT dominates over it
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I’ve heard of being able to tell her ghost/hypo bc the babies are lighter in color and kusko pics out het clowns bc the patterns are cleaner so maybe most of what is none is incorrect and not document well or at all
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For the record recessive traits don’t show physical indicators by very definition. So I don’t think there is any type of “het influence” I think it’s very clear in the sire and the two hatchlings there is an additional gene. I’m usually the guy saying there isn’t one there lol. But I think it’s pretty evident in this case imo. And I have hatched plenty of pieds ghosts and hets of such. But I’m wrong plenty of times. But I’m not going to be convinced otherwise on this.
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Recessive traits in ball pythons can, do, and will sometimes express changes in the heterozygous form. People who work a lot with clowns and pieds will agree. Even the recent debate over whether paint/sentinel was recessive or codominant due to heterozygous expression lends credence to the idea that some recessives can express somewhat in the heterozygous form. This has been a pretty significant debate in the ball python community for a long time, about whether some of these classical “recessive” genes actually act more as a codominant. In my experience, they do. It probably has more to do with what seems to be more genetic plasticity in reptiles (and amphibians) than in mammals or birds though. Things we define as recessive in mammals rarely express anything in the heterozygous form, and most of this genetic research originated with domesticated mammals and birds. (I’m intentionally ignoring plants here - tetraploidy is a trip.)
Are those expressions always indicative of a het at play in reptiles? Not necessarily, no. But when creating possible hets it’s generally a safe bet that animals with extreme displays (ringers, dorsal striping, extremely light color saturation, white bellies, ‘railroad tracks’, etc.) of typically mundane combos are going to prove as hets. This has been well established for as long as I can remember, and I’ve been doing this a while.
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I am not experienced enough to know whether their are influences with Hets or not. But 9 times out of ten when I am watching a video about recessive genes almost all of the people say that there are het influences. But As I have said I don’t know if there is or not.
I have looked on my Enchi Mystic Spider Het Pied girl and I don’t see what they are talking about. Maybe my girl doesn’t have the right genes for Het influences or maybe I just don’t know what I’m looking for. Which is probably the maybe just don’t know. LOL!
Regardless of anyone’s beliefs, I learn a lot from each of you no matter what you have to offer to teach me.
I admire all of you for your dedication for the reptiles you keep and the knowledge you pass on to future generations of snake breeders like myself. Thank you! 
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Then by scientific definition it would be an incomplete dominant trait. Your literally trying to change the definition of a recessive trait. Ball pythons follow the same genetics everything else does lol.
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Not necessarily, the definition itself is flawed. It’s the same as defining a species, what actually is the definition of a species? We have plenty of things that breaks those definitions (i.e. blue-winged and golden-winged warblers produce fertile hybrids which can then backcross into both parent species, so are they really a species?). At the end of the day, a definition is a broad generality that works most but not all of the time.
I realize not everybody knows who I am, but I’m an associate professor of wildlife ecology and management, I literally teach college level courses on this stuff. When I say definitions are broke, they’re broke, haha. It’s nothing personal and it’s a source of great frustration even for us professionals. Genetic plasticity is a jerk and breaks rules.
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That would be your opinion but that doesn’t change the actual definition of a recessive trait.
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Since pied, clown, and ghost (probably more) show “het influence” they’re inc-dom morphs. I’m just putting this thought here (again) for reference. I’m not going to discuss/debate this on this thread and hijack the thread.
This has confused me before since even low expression morphs that have het influences (pied, clown, ghost) are technically dominant for the pure reason that they have an expression in the heterozygous form. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just a baseline for understanding and isn’t a strict classification.
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At the end of the day, definitions are artificial constructs invented by humans that help us name and describe the world around us, the definitions are always wrong in some way but they are useful, so we keep them (maps are the same way, all maps are wrong due to distortion of representing a round planet on a flat surface, but they are still useful). Reality is far more complex than a simple definition. As I described above, we can’t even define what a species is adequately, due to hybridization (Centrarchid fishes, oaks and pines, some birds, RAT SNAKE TAXONOMY MAKE ME HULK ANGERY), geographic isolation of populations (jumping mice populations out west, woodrat populations in the east), polyploidy (especially with salamanders and plants), etc. Legally, this has resulted in real conundrums with Endangered Species Act enforcement, as an example. And that’s with a definition as important as “what is a species?”
We can start calling any “recessive” that has some expression in the heterozygous form as a codominant or incomplete dominant trait (I agree with @erie-herps here with ball pythons, although piebaldism in mammals and birds are strict recessives), but I think that would confuse a lot of people in the hobby as not everyone is a biologist who cares about these semantics.
But, bringing the conversation back on track, I bet I’m right with the triple het stuff working its magic on the phenotypic variability on this clutch. Let’s revisit this conversation in a few years when some of these genes start proving out (and not proving out for others).
This is my last post here unless I’m tagged with a question, I don’t wish to clog the thread further. Congrats on a great looking clutch!
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Not sure this will end discussion or not, but it’s well understood in the scientific community that there can be incomplete expression of recessive genes in the heterozygous form. This has been studied in mice (citations given but not really for the casual reader: https://academic.oup.com/hmg/article/7/6/945/2896770) and human diseases (https://tinyurl.com/3azbtbmm, HEREDITARY BLINDNESS AMONG PINGELAPESE PEOPLE OF EASTERN CAROLINE ISLANDS - ScienceDirect).
The genetic origin of piebaldism in ball pythons has been identified and the cause is different than in mammals (in mammals it’s a neural crest disorder, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2020/11/01/2020.10.30.362970.1.full.pdf).
Although no peer-reviewed literature exists that I can find that discusses incomplete expression of piebaldism and other “recessives” in ball pythons, such distinctions seem to be more of a terminology issue in the hobby rather than a truly scientific debate. Incomplete expression can be sometimes used interchangeably with incomplete dominance; the allele for the “recessive” morph is considered recessive, the “dominant” allele is the “normal phenotype” allele. Depending upon the genetic makeup of the individual, if the “normal phenotype” allele is affected in some way by other alleles on a chromosome, incomplete expression of a typically recessive trait could occur.
We have a tendency to think that each allele is fully independent of other alleles when we discuss recessive traits in ball pythons. However, we know alleles interact with each other, sometimes creating crazy results, especially in plants (such as totally new alleles in corn: https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/135/3/881/6011312?login=true, or abortion of gametes in tomatoes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1211010/pdf/85.pdf). For some reason this confusion doesn’t exist when we discuss codominant traits, although the mechanisms are the same. For example, we know fire interacts with yellowbelly to create fire yellowbellies that look different from each individual morph, we know that the different blue-eyed leucistic and black-eyed leucistic morphs create different looking homozygous animals, etc. The examples of allelic interaction are endless, it’s literally the basis of the hobby.
It’s reasonable (in fact, I believe it is accurate) to assume that traditionally “recessive” genes can also be affected by allelic interactions, especially when one or more morphs are at play. It’s likewise reasonable to assume the ‘strength’ of that incomplete expression of a typically recessive trait will naturally vary by how it interacts with other alleles. Please refer to my post above with how these codominant genes interact with a single piebald allele and results in an incomplete expression of that piebald allele, but in short, we know het pieds can create ringers, dorsal stripes, reduced patterns, and lighter colors in morphs such as cinnamons, lessers, yellowbellies, etc.
That all said, I’m not sure it matters whether we label piebald as recessive. The snakes don’t care, and you can’t get a piebald snake without both parents haven’t at least one copy of the gene. Be free, be merry, don’t get hung up on terminology, and have fun with the hobby everyone.
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So is the question then, If one “recessive” gene only reliably shows in the heterozygous with another gene that is not an allele, would we still call it recessive?
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When I was breeding back in 2013, all the Het pied ball pythons I owned had “Railroad Tracks” on it’s belly towards it’s tail.
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