I see these African imports show up on the market and maybe someday it would be neat to snatch one and see what happens.
But what do you even do? If it looks like it has a funky pattern, would you breed her to a normal male? Something else in your collection and then breed a son back to the female?
Have not done so personally but I believe that’s the way to go about it. In your scenario the “dinker” is a female, she would have some type of expression that stands out to you as different and you want to see if you can re-create it genetically. So bred to a normal male you see if that trait passes on to the offspring. If it does pass on then could be dom or codom and you need to prove out if it has a super form. If it doesn’t prove you need to prove that maybe its recessive. Both scenarios you breed the offspring back to the female to see if you can prove them out.
Im sure some will have an issue with offspring to parent and sibling to sibling pairing but it would be more difficult, time consuming, and you would have a bunch of normal dinkers in your collection until proven.
That being said, if you bred her to a recessive such as pied or clown the offspring would atleast be het for something and not just normals and you should still be able to pick out the trait from them.
Maybe some others with experience can point us in the right direction.
Very logical and totally makes sense. Maybe someday it would be fun!
I will interject here that a more proper way to do it would be to breed “het” to “het” which removes the possibility that, in the first breeding, you just had bad odds and only the WT copy of a dominantly inherited gene was passed along to all the offspring.
So, are you saying to breed the siblings from the same mother to prove it out?
Yes. Or you can breed the mother to one male the first year and a different male the second year. The females from the first year are then up to size around the time the males from the second year are ready to breed so you are breeding half-sibs instead of full sibs. It also gives you two breedings against the original animal to more properly establish what may be happening.
I will also add, from first hand experience, that the whole process is nowhere near as easy as it sounds on paper
As Dr. Wyman stated, odds are at play as well. I’ve produced several clutches out of a pair of 100% hets before I actually hit a visual. It can be a long arduous process to truly prove an animal out, and of course consider that the majority of dinkers will not prove to be anything special.
3 years ago a funky looking normal I have produced a male photo copy of herself in a clutch with other obvious normals. Most likely she’s just a forgotten or lost het of some sort. When I finally solve this mystery it will be purely for my personal pleasure, I will have spent more money and time on it than it could possibly pay me back. A few years of food, missing out on her normal clutch production, heat, rack space, etc. and what I’m most likely to learn is that she’s het for a $300 recessive gene that I already have. To top it off, if I don’t see any visual genes it still doesn’t necessarily mean something isn’t going on, and I get to repeat the whole process. This could go on for a couple more years even, and end in eventually discovering that nothing is going on and she just makes two obviously different phenos of normal lol.
My point is, if you’re going to do it, do it for fun. The investment is going to be hard to recoup in most cases.
Do either of you regret going through the process? I feel like its another part of the hobby that I haven’t found a whole lot of people talking about, a lot less sexy than combos that people are producing. To me, it would definetly be a “lets see what happens” more than “I HAVE THE NEXT BEST THING SINCE MONSOON PAY ME” type venture.
It was not a money making thing for me either, I was just interested in what might have been going on and then a 48 unit wall rack, four years, and nothing to show for it… I regret losing the time, space, and energy it cost and the lost opportunities for other projects that occurred from the previous three listed things.
It was a novel process. Not sure I would want to repeat it again though
Appreciate the insight. The pros (curiosity, novelty) and cons (money sink, energy sink) of it are definetly good to keep in mind… Maybe someday, don’t have the energy or resources at the moment, but it gets me thinking.
I have multiple dinker projects going currently, one was worked on for years by a friend of mine, which then I took over the project about 7 or so years ago. Still have nothing concrete to show for that one.
Travis brings up a good point about space and effort it takes with no certainty you will have anything to show for it. If I dedicated as much time and space as Travis did, I might already have my answer. However I’d rather put that same energy into other projects and have the dinker stuff as back burner, just a few breeding’s a year. With that said I still have 18 tubs filled between 4 dinker projects and I’m quite aware they will probably not even pay for their own food bill. Doesn’t make it any less fun though.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It really would only be for fun, and wanted to make sure I did it right!