I was thinking about some of my leopard gecko breeding plans and I was thinking about the variable expression of black night, a melanin-increasing polygenic morph. What I was wondering is how a white gecko can become darker due to black night. I’m wondering because I have a super snow eclipse black night that’s dark. A super snow itself is white with black spots, but I’m wondering how black night is able to “override” that white pigment to create a darker gecko. In ball pythons a piebald super black pastel or super mojave super black pastel won’t result in a dark animal (in the areas that are normally white), so how is this possible in leopard geckos? Does that mean that the black night is a very high quality where it somehow overrides the white or is the white area really an off-white giving the black night an opportunity to create darker colors?
@t_h_wyman @chesterhf Do you know how this could happen?
It has to do with the nature of the mutation that causes the “white”
With Pied, melanocytes do not migrate properly. So while you are getting an overabundance of melanin, it is still all getting dumped randomly about the body
With SuperMojave (and any of the other BluELs), all pigmentation cells are dysfunctional in their ability to “hold” the actual pigment molecules. Since the pigments “leak” out, they cannot accumulate and persist
I do not know enough about leopards to have a solid idea of how SuperSnow likely behaves on a molecular level so I cannot make a solidly coherent guess as to how BlackNight would interact
That does help to understand the pigments a lot, thank you! Looking around on the marketplace it seems that a lot of Super Snow Eclipses are an off-white, but the black night that I have has some areas that are much lighter (like the dorsal). I would still expect it to be much lighter since a super snow eclipse is still very light. Hopefully I’ll be able to learn a bit more about how the pigments develop with my breeding projects.