After a discussion with our local geneticists I came to realise that a bunch of “isms” are thrown around at complete random in the reptile hobby and I’d like to discuss it in depth.
Most of these words are commonly thrown about throughout the community, but the meaning behind them is often skewed from the scientifical meanings.
Let’s start with a easy one that we’ve discussed before, Piebald. It’s obviously Piebaldism, this is a mutation that happens in a multitude of different animals.
What about Fire… it creates “Black Eyed Leucistic”… it must be leucism, right?
How about Ghost?.. those that know there ball python morphs will know it as Hypo also. Hypomelanistic?
Before we get into the discussion part, which we will likely need @t_h_wyman to back me up, let’s have a poll just for some fun. See if you can guess the correct “ism”.
Let’s kick off the discussion and drop the answer to number 1, Banana
A lot of you guys did well here, others may have been tripped up by remembering that Bananas are a type of albino and maybe placed them in the same group.
This one had a rather big division in answers, with Hypopigmentation being the favourite. Unfortunately, you guys are slightly off track[1]. The answer is right in the name of the Super (homozygous) form… the Blue Eyed ‘Leucistic’.
To start some discussion here I will throw a wrench into our communities current understanding of Leucism. Leucism/ Leukism is not just a single mutation but rather a group of related ones, but not necessarily allelic with one another.
Now this next bit is something @t_h_wyman will need to confirm. The specific type of Leucism we are dealing with in a Lesser is not recessive, as it is in the majority of cases in the animal world. It’s a Incomplete Dominant trait that has a visual effect in its heterozygous form.
Because of this, I believe we are looking at Isabelline, which is a form of Leucism that is present in other animals such as horses. In horses it is an incomplete dominant dilution gene that produces a horse with a gold coat and dark eyes (Lesser) when heterozygous, and a light cream-coloured horse with blue eyes (BluEL) when homozygous.
Actually, everyone that said Hypopigmentation is correct. The single gene Lesser, that we are discussing, has a reduction in display of all pigments. Reduced pigment = Hypopigmentation. And the superform is Hypopigmentation taken to the extreme of Apigmentation which is phenotypically expressed as Leucism.
We would need a genetic-level interrogation to validate this gene as being the same as Isabelline, but behaviourally they are similar
The same holds true for basically all of our morphs though, we call them by their phenotype, not the underlying disorder.
There are two (or three or four depending on how you want to split the hair) types of leucism in balls: BluEL and BlkEL (and Ivory and all-white Pied)
To take it further, there are a whole bunch of animals that we consider to be “albino” of one type or other (Albino, Lavender Albino, Candy, Caramel Albino, Ultramel, etc.) but the reality of it is that only one of them can be tyrosinase-negative amelanism
Ppshhh, only if you’re going to take the word of the geneticist over someone that learnt some of these words in the past few days … then yeah, your right
! I hope I actually get more right, but I’m always willing to learn.
