I disagree completely. Continuing to use the wrong term when you know it is wrong just because it is easy is not an excuse. Further, I would argue that a sizable section of the hobby do not even know it is wrong. When something is wrong, you work to correct it. We should be educating people, not perpetuating wrong information
I never said to call it “het Pastel”. As hobby terms, Pastel and SuperPastel are fine. But genetics is a defined science and as long as we all want to claim to understand the genetics of our animals then we should be using the terms correctly
Not. Most definitely NOT. Frequently people will try and argue that adding more morphs will fix the problem with a certain morph. This is like saying that if your car has a faulty carburetor you can fix it by smashing the tail lights.
Eaglereptiles pretty much covered it but in a bit more simple terms; The mutation for Banana/CG sits on the sex chromosomes. This, generally, means that the mutation is inherited in a fairly specific manner. In the specific case of balls, there is a slight deviation however that confuses people.
A little bit of science jargon here. In lower-level snakes, evolutionarily speaking, the sex-chromosomes follow the X/Y system and the sex-chromosomes themselves are highly isomorphic, e.g., same size and shape, (higher-level snakes use the Z/W system and the sex chromosomes are heteromorphic). Because the sex chromosomes are structurally very similar you can have material exchange between them and sometimes that material exchange involves the mutant gene. Clear as mud so far LOL?
So… The Banana/CG gene in your male sits on the Y chromosome. This means that only the offspring he produces that carry the Y chromosome (i.e., males) will inherit the mutation. But… Remember my mention of material exchange between chromosomes? That happens at about a 10% rate for the area that carries the Banana/CG gene. When that happens the mutation would switch from the Y chromosome to the X chromosome and so you would get a female carrying the mutation. So there is a possibility your male could produce a female, just at very low odds.
Make sense?
Yes, it is totally incorrect. Co-dominant and incomplete-dominant are two entirely different things. Claiming Co-dom really means inc-dom is like claiming the word “dog” really means “cat”
Yes, DNA testing is a thing for snakes but no, not at the level you are talking about.
Ben Morrill/Reptile Genetic Services offers sexing services from sheds for some species, primarily colubrids.
In theory, it is possible to build up a database like you describe however would be extremely cost-prohibitive. Sequencing in and of itself is pretty cheap these days but fully annotating a genome is no small task and then you have to comparatively analyze the genomes of every known mutation back against the wild-type genome, identify the mutation, which may be as minor as a single “letter” change out of around 1,500,000 “letters”. That takes a pretty significant amount of sequencing and a huge amount of computing power. Soft numbers… You might be able to pull it off for $500,000.
Not explicitly but that is the definite origin of the issue. Back in the dark ages, NERD had two similar looking animals that they called Woma. When they bred one to a Lesser it made your run of the mill Lesser Woma. When they bred the other to a Lesser it made a SoulSucker. And so they put forth the claim that there was some gene “hidden” in the second animal that caused the SoulSucker phenotype. The reality is that Woma and HGW are two completely different morphs. But that myth of a “hidden” gene persists… I can think of at least a half dozen other times it has been used to explain something rather than the more scientifically sound arguments people have put forth