Hello! I just recently made an account on this platform looking for advice, I plan on breeding leopard geckos! Only issue… I have no idea where to start!
I have plenty experience with caring for animals and reptiles but zero when it comes to genetics and breeding. I’ve been trying to understand it for awhile seeking out media and researching the topic but either I’ve been looking at bad sources, or I’m just stupid! I’m making this post seeking out help and/or advice regarding breeding leopard geckos and genetics, heavy on the genetics part. I already understand the process of breeding Leos but I don’t understand the genetics, and I really wish to avoid any sort of genetic disorders when breeding.
To give you a rough idea of my situation, I live at two separate houses and I have a single Leo at each house, but I want to primarily focus on Alphonse, he’s slightly over a year old and I got him from my local pet store. He seems to be a Murphy’s patternless but his yellow hue on his back is very subtle. I plan on buying two adult females and maybe another male for breeding.
This is where I’m stumped. I’m not 100% sure of Alphonse’s morph and I only figured it out by looking it up online. I also heard that breeding certain morphs can result in genetic deficiencies which I don’t want at all! I’ve ben trying to figure out what morphs breed well together and ones don’t.
More things I don’t understand. I’ve seen terms like het, pure, enigma, and lots of other terms that just confuse me. I also don’t know as much about the dominant and recessive genes (about as much as the average middle schooler lol) when it comes to breeding I want to get a fair understanding of what I’m going to hatch. I already know about the act of temperature sexing Leos and how to incubate them. I’d say I’ve got a fair understanding of everything BUT genetics! I don’t want to go into this blindly and start with at least a fair amount of knowledge on this topic.
My goal currently is to learn about genetics and breeding and successfully help hatch, foster, and potentially sell (later on) some Leos.
All I ask is for some advice on how to understand this and do it safely, if you could maybe send me a link to websites, recommend people or groups, or just some basic advice. Thank you for taking you time reading this and big thanks to anyone who responds! I look forward to spending time on this platform!
Genetics is always a doozy.
Personally, I would avoid breeding anything from a pet shop especially if you aren’t sure on the genetics.
A lot of it involves just time and studying…it can take a while to wrap your head around the genes and such
As far as some of the terms you brought up…
-enigma is a gene that is frowned upon breeding in leopard geckos. It causes ‘enigma syndrome’ which is a vestibular disorder than causes them to move in circles, alligator roll or have seizure like twitches. It may not present very much in some, but you can have one that shows almost no symptoms have offspring that can’t even eat because of the severity of symptoms.
-pure is typically used in line bred traits. These are polygenic genes that can’t be reliably passed from parents to offspring like a dominant or recessive. You’ll see it mentioned in things like ‘bloods’ or ‘black nights’. In the case of bloods, you would breed the most intense colors to another and keep the beat looking offspring to breed to better looking animals and so on to develop the colors. If you take one from this specific lineage and breed it to something that is not also from Blood lineage, it would no longer be ‘pure’ and would be a blood ‘cross’
-Het typically means that they’re carrying one copy of a recessive gene such as albino, blizzard or Murphy’s patternless. Het is short for heterozygous. The visual is a Homozygous (hom)
Hets won’t have the visual look, they would look normal. You would need 2 copies to produce a visual.
This is the part that a calculator can help with …
Het to het can produce 1:4 visuals. You can’t tell the hets apart from the 1:4 that don’t have the gene at all.
Het to visual can produce a 50/50 mix of hets to visuals. The visual will always guarantee het offspring because it has 2 copies to give to offspring vs the het’s single.
Visual to visual will always produce more visuals.
Genes like mack snow is also technically het/hom… But instead we just say mack snow and super mack snow since both forms are able to be told apart from normal geckos.
As an aside, super snows can be born with a defect to the nose that causes breathing issues.
Leopard gecko genetics have a lot of little bits that really require attention if you are looking to produce certain looks… Like RAPTORs… The combo has become a watered down version of what it should be because of people breeding poor quality animals to jump on the bandwagon and make $$.
Also it is very difficult to dip your toes into Leo breeding and actually make money so don’t feel like you need to rush things. Just take your time and feel things out.
I dunno how much this post actually helps or not …
But definitely check out the morphipedia here for info too. There’s a good list of the polygenic lines there
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Thanks! This really helps out a lot!
I could certainly see this as being helpful later on.