Gargoyle Geckos are like Crested Geckos. Their morphs are polymorphic which means that their phenotype depends on multiple alleles. I don’t know much about Gargoyle Gecko morphs so I’ll use Crested Gecko morphs as an example, both of their morphs behave the same. When you pair a dalmatian to a dalmation you don’t necessarily get a super dalmation, the offsprings spots will vary from one to another. In “normal” morph behavior you might estimate that 25% of the offspring will be super dalmation. With polymorphic morphs you might say it’s likely that there will be some super dalmations. There’s no way to accurately predict how many spots are going to occur from a dalmation x dalmation pairing, also there is no set example between a dalmation and a super dalmation. All of a gargoyle geckos morphs are like line bred snows in leopard geckos. Combining one with another won’t result in hets or “hidden” for a generation. That’s why if you were to combine a dalmatian to a chevron you’ll get something in between them. Pairing two of the offspring from that pairing won’t result in 25% being dalmation chevron, it’ll result in maybe having a chevron dalmatian possibly getting a dalmation. Essentially they’re all similar to line bred traits.
A calculator would be near impossible to be accurate without extensive knowledge from people who keep them and it wouldn’t be anything near accurate. These animals have morphs they just behave differently. For example a dalmation (crested gecko) is a crested gecko that has spots, a dalmation x dalmation will produce more dalmations except there’s no easy way to predict them, a high expression dalmation x a high expression dalmation will likely produce mostly high expression dalmations, possibly some super dalmations, possibly some normal dalmations. So they are still able to be grouped by morph, some examples of morphs in gargoyle geckos are red-stripe, reticulated, orange blot, etc. Sometimes they will have multiple morphs if they don’t interfere with each other (dalmatian [spotted] and patternless [patternless], you can’t have both in the same gecko)
A calculator would pretty much be pointless, with gargoyles a Red, Dorsal Blotch, Mid Horned x a Orange, Super Blotch, Small Horned is just going to result in a pos Red pos Dorsal Blotch pos Mid Horned pos Orange pos Super Blotch pos Small Horned. Basically any morphs from the parents could come in the offspring. I think it’d be better to put that in the description than try to make a calculator which just repeats the inputs.
So as for trait tags, as in the above picture by John, would the current list be the best way to go about it? Is this how you would expect to customise your searches?
↓
Base
Red
Orange
White
Pastel
Bacon = Red on Orange
Reverse Bacon = Orange on Red
Pattern
Reticulated
Banded
Mottled
Blotch
Super Blotch
Dorsal Blotch/Skeleton
Striped
Super Stripe
Aberrant
Mosaic
Side bars
Dorsal bars
Lateral bars
Background Colour
Red
Pink
Orange
Yellow
White
Brown
Horns
Large horned
Mid horned
Small horned
Eye rings
Yellow
Red
Orange
Blush/Tear
Eyes
Phantom Eye
Blue eye
Other traits
Lipstick
So say for a extreme example,: [Red Base] on [White] [Banded] [Midhorn][Yellow Rings][Phantom Eye] ?
Hey guys, hope this is useful. I myself have a wide array of Garg and Crested morphs that we’ve been breeding to try and genotype traits in Gargs and Cresteds since 2007. Much more work has been done with Cresteds from our side than Gargs but we should look to the Gargoyle book for a foundation on the morphs when it comes to Gargoyles. This is at least a good foundation where we know large colonies of Gargs were cataloged around 1200 or so animals to create a foundation of traits and classify their inheritance. This also gives us a “textbook” if you will that we can refer people to that has photo evidence of the traits and examples of what incomplete dominance and slight co-dominance looks like when breeding multiple combo morphs for non-allelic traits.
As for the mendelian and larger discussion of Polymorphism within these animals. I and a few other breeders are working at dispelling the misunderstanding that has propagated through the community concerning these animals. I will table that for another topic, but will happily discuss it.
Back to Gargs… below is my list of traits that I’m using on my site right now, and I included a brief description of how I understand they work and added some combo morphs that we’ve proven out here such as Skeleton. This is easily referenced in the Garg book, please let me know what you think. Also I would happily chat over the phone or web meeting as it is sometimes easier to get thoughts across that way concerning these things.
If you guys want, we can also set up a google doc so we can combine our resources and ideas about the different morphs, let me know what you think.
GARGOYLE MORPHS
Aberrant Stripe
Geckos that combine stripes, broken stripes, and/or blotches along the sides. They are a result of breeding two striped animals heterozygous for striped. Because the banded trait has a weak codominant influence on the striped trait, multigeneration breeding of imperfectly striped animals can lead to increasingly atypical individuals
Alterna
Uniform background color with rows of thin wavy black bars. It is consistently maintained through line breeding but does also appear in banded to banded breedings.
BR or Banded/Reticulated
Juveniles start off banded and as they grow the pattern spreads and forms more or less defined rows of irregular or wavy bands.
When the rows are well defined it is Banded
When less defined it will appear reticulated (netlike pattern)
Black or ‘Melanistic’
Near-Black gargoyles. Many have a yellowish tint in the background color, clearly visible in the belly color.
Black and White or ‘Hypoxanthic’
Characterized by reduced or absent brown, red, orange, and yellow pigments, yielding a high-contrast black pattern against a white background.
Blotch, Orange or Red blotch
This pattern seems to be a result or influence of the banded gene on red/orange pigment distribution. Red or Orange pigment cells are segregated to form irregular dorsal and lateral blotches
Super blotch
Larger blotches
Ghost
An animal uniform in color with no distinct bands or reticulation
Hypo
An animal lacking in black and brown pigmentation, reticulation can appear as grey to almost completely absent
Mosaic
A complex variant of the banded pattern were defined whitish bands arc formed along the sides. Currently, it seems to be a (Hzg) Reticulated and (Het) Striped. The bands arc to for “C’ shapes connected to bands that change direction horizontally.
Pastel
Pale or washed out colored animals, blacks are grey, oranges are more apricot, reds and pink. The thin dark bars on the belly are also faded and a good criterion for identifying this trait.
Pink/Hot Pink
This may be a result of a quantifier gene on the red/orange pigments or a variant of the pastel trait. The pink varies in intensity from very pale to an almost pink-lemonade shade.
Phantom
Characterized as animals with dark grey to black eye color
Quad Stripe
4 rows of distinct colored lines on the dorsal or
Skeleton (Combo Morph 3-4 traits)
Orange/red stripe, banded, and Blotch, the hypo versions of these are the most impressive showing no dark-colored bands
Striped
This is a general term that indicates all variants of striped. It also applies to geckos with neat middorsal lines that may show wavy lateral lines or blotches on the lower sides.
Orange Stripe
Colored Orange rows of stripes
Red Stripe
Colored Red rows of stripes
Red and Orange Stripe
Red and orange striped rows
Aberrant red/orange stripe
Broken stripes or dashes of stripes
Superstripe
The pattern forms neat lines in both the middorsal and lateral areas. The ‘superstriped’ trait is typically expressed by animals homozygous for striped
Ultra Stripe
This morph shows many narrow lines of pigment rather than few broad ones
Yellow
Yellowish background animals, further verified by examining the belly
This is absolutely amazing and beyond what I could have asked for, thank you so much and welcome to the forum!
Which book would this be?
Hopefully I can find it digitally, so that I can go through it without having to wait for delivery.
Please feel free do create this topic, I would heavily benefit from your input.
This is a offer I may take you up on depending on how difficult communication through here is.
We could actually do this here on the forum if that is something you would be interested in. It would allow contributions and suggestions from others to be heard.
We can create “wikis” (like this topic) where users can edit a post and crowd source information… Like our Ball Python Morph Encyclopedia and Leopard gecko morph masterlist.
So both these genes are confirmed recessive?
Again thank you for all of this, it is seriously appreciated!
We sell it. There are no digital copies though.
It is Gargoyle Geckos by Philippe de Vosjoli-Allen Repashy-Frank Fast GARGOYLE GECKO
For now, I want to finish the resource we’re working on for people to be able to cross-reference what we plan on releasing. It is 18 years of my knowledge in the hobby, and 14 years of breeding and another well-known breeder of 18+ years and 14+ years of breeding combining our collective knowledge and our gecko collections and cataloging of around 1200 animals and basically going through the steps to create a knowledge base and foundation for the genetics. We are working hard to release this information this year with tons of clear diagrams and examples for the community.
As for polymorphic, it isn’t what we all believe it is. Although more difficult to predict things the animal’s genetics are still tied to heritable traits. Often times I read people referring to Polymorphic as a slot machine of genes the animal has to choose from and anything can pop up. The problem is defining the base traits and their variation. As with many morphs already established, we can find huge variances in each phenotype and we just need to define what those are and how large that range is in cresteds.
Using the dalmatian example we can relate it to Pied ball pythons, not the recessive part but the variation of high expression to low expression. in some examples you can’t even tell it actually is a pied until you look at the belly and some examples you can’t tell it’s a combo unless you look at the head stamp. This leaves us with defining a phenotype using just a few scales, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t predictable or heritable. Crested Dalmatians for our breedings are Dominant, (Het) and (Hzg) forms are largely similar although (Hzg) forms seem to produce or have the chance to produce animals with a large number of spots. Using Punnett tables in this form has worked out for us 100% of the time. Never once did a dalmatian pop up out of nowhere unless we added it to the project.
I can just send you my phone number and we can chat and start there.
This sounds great I’m new so will happily take your lead on this.
Heterozygous refers to only one allele having the trait we are referring to. Therefore, it is used to describe Recessive and Dominant traits. Using Ball Python examples here. In the reptile hobby, (Het) is often used to describe recessive mutations but (Het) Pied, (Het) Pastel, (Het) Pinstripe are the correct terms in genetics. Respectively these traits are Recessive, Dominant, and Dominant, and all of them are technically incomplete dominant. We just don’t use the correct terminology because genetics is very confusing in its verbiage. When you refer the traits to themselves ONLY then Pied is recessive and requires a (HZG) animal to present visually, Pastel is Incomplete Dominant to itself and other traits. Pinstripe is dominant and has the same phenotype in (Het) and (Hzg) form but is incomplete-dominant to non-allelic traits and has a different calculation for the genes in a calculator between each form.
We are extremely glad to have you make yourself at home.
You have obviously been in the hobby for a while, so you could likely share some extremely useful tips and tricks around here.
I’ll head on over to your site and check it out.
I look forward to it, I never really realised how big of a rabbit hole the Garg world is until I dived in. Especially with there being so many variations and so little discussion easily found online.
Sure, send it over in a message and we will sort it out.
No problem, I could whip up a draft quickly with the info above and we can work from there on it.
Oh, I get the confusion about genetic terminology. @t_h_wyman and @chesterhf keep us all in check on our misuse of genetic wording
For the sake of simplicity to calculate, do you think absolutely any of these could fit into the hobby’s uses of the terms?
“recessive” (one copy = non-visual, two copies = visual),
“inc-dominant” (one copy = visual, two copies = different visual/“super”),
“dominant” (one copy = visual, two copies = the same visual/no “super”)
I just remembered about a Garg breeder who has some of this info I posted above on their website. I just looked and they updated it with some nice pictures. Link below.
Yes, that is the simplest form of how things work. How I like to explain things is that we need to describe traits in 2 ways, Dominance, and Phenotypic Expression. Traits can be dominant or recessive but when you want to explain what it looks like with non-allelic traits and combo morphs we need to use the Phenotypic Expression. If we get that part down we can really start to teach people how to classify Crested and Gargs. Plus this is going to be needed as we are entering the world of 4-7 gene combo ball pythons, mixing multiple recessive, incomplete dominant, and dominant traits. All of which together create a single phenotype.
The simple form will cover the gamut of Allelic traits, and non-allelic traits, so I really like the simplicity and agree we need to keep using it. In Crested and Balls we can see traits have a distribution on the animal on certain areas, Belly, Head, Dorsal, LateralS, and for geckos limbs. Some ball python traits lose their dominance in some areas and some traits push through others and make the trait behave in ways that change from incomplete dominant to co-dominant, this makes things confusing really fast but this is a really good way to describe the behavior of traits when mixed with each other, making the combos or polymorphs we so love an enjoy in the hobby.
Both @GargoyleQueen and her website have been one of the best sources of Garg information on the entire internet. I would have been completely lost without it
So how would you expect the list of traits to look on the market place, would you be happy seeing the below traits listed like this in the Gargoyles section?
Base
Red
Orange
White
Pastel
Bacon = Red on Orange
Reverse Bacon = Orange on Red
Pastel
Hot pink (Orange&Red)
Hot pink (Pastel)
Pattern
Reticulated
Banded
Mottled
Blotch/orange/red blotch
Super Blotch
Dorsal Blotch/Skeleton
Aberrant Stripe - superstriped
Ghost
Quad stripe
Mosaic
Orange stripe
Red stripe
Orange and red stripe
Ultra stripe
Side bars
Dorsal bars
Lateral bars
Background Colour
Red
Pink
Orange
Yellow
White
Brown
Alterna
Black/Melanistic
Hypo
Skeleton
Following the categories and structure more closely related to what’s in the book, this is how I reordered it. I spent a good deal of time on this, a few you stated in separate categories with the same name have been added to the correct category and I defined the category more towards what it effects on the animal. Please see below and if you want to go over it on the phone happy to.
make yourself at home.