Albino x Pied

Two years running I have mated my pied het male to my albino het female - HETS, not visual pied or albino. Nicely, both clutches are 1.4.

The male and females from the first clutch are almost heavy enough to breed back to each other. Am I a fool in thinking anything can actually happen with this? I remember reading in a post a while back that mating the offspring back to each other from an actual pied x an actual albino pairing had a 1 in 16 chance of producing an actual pied albino offspring.

Does that make my chances 1 in 32?

I'd appreciate any feedback even if its to tell me I am wasting my time!

Thanks all. Mike Dougherty

If you bred a double het to a double het your odds of producing an albino pied would be 1 in 16. Since there is no way for you to know that your animals are or are not hets until you breed them makes it much more difficult. Each baby has a 50% chance of being a het pied and then another 50% chance of being het albino. If you breed them together and get nothing, you still do not even know what they may or may not be het for. At least if you get an albino or a pied you will know the 2 animals you bred together had that recessive gene, but how do you know which ones to breed to which ones.

I personally think the albino pied will not be very exciting to look at. The pied is remarkable due to it's contrast which the albino will loose. The pied white next to the albino's yellow will not very pronounced. You have a lot of tough choices ahead. Hopefully you hit the odds and get lucky and at least get some albinos and/or pieds for your trouble. I wish you luck.

This is like high school math, it's giving me a headache...

Does the known pied het have the belly marker and if so do any of the offspring? If your line has the marker (not all hets do) it might help you out on the pied side. If you have a choice use a possible double het male with the marker. I haven't heard any reliable evidence of a way short of breeding to find het albinos.

Without markers to tip the odds in your favor then each of the potential breeders has a 50% chance of being het albino and a 50% chance of being het pied. The two chances combine by multiplication to make a 1:4 chance of being a double het pied albino. In order to even have a shot at a double homozygous both animals in the pair need to be double hets. Again the combination is via multiplication and just happens to come out to a 1:16 chance of a randomly selected pair of your possible double hets both being double het. Then, you need to hit the separate 1:16 odds for each egg they produce. The more eggs you get the better the chance of that. The formula for figuring the odds of producing one or more pied albino in a clutch of size n from double hets would be 1 - (15/16)^n. Once you get eggs and candle them you can figure your overall project odds of producing a pied albino as follows:

odds both are double hets X odds at least one egg is albino pied

in this case

1/16 * (1 - (15/16)^n)

where n is the number of eggs you get. If you get a 6 egg clutch your chances of at least one being a pied albino is:

1/16 * (1 - (15/16)^6) = 1/16 * 0.32 = 0.02 = 2%

Yes it's a long shot but the marker might help you out and you have a much better chance of producing just albino or pied than you do of producing an albino pied. Also, now that you have the possible double het girls growing up you might decide to buy a known double het boy to increase your odds as they eventually become more affordable.

I’ve got a longer odds project that that for you! In 2004 I bred a 66% chance het caramel male to a 50% chance het albino female. At least you started out with known het parents! In my case I did it to have a shot at testing if albino and caramel are alleles (different mutations of the same gene). I produced 1.5 normal but really didn’t prove anything since one or both of my possible hets may well not be a het. Looking on the bright side though the daughters now have a possible possible het dice roll on both sides so the chances of them being completely normal is decreased. Of course now I have to decide what to breed them to.

Evan and Randy, thanks for the genetic odds figures - I figured there had to be some people good at math out there!

And I do have 3 (out of 8) females with serious belly stripe pied markers, so thats truly a nice thing to look forward to. I'll be fattening the first 4 up one more year. They are now 12-1300 grams. If only I could get them to switch to thawed rats - they insist on live mice which is so slow and such a bother.

Happy Holidays!

MD

I don't think anyone can claim the marker is 100% but I sure think it helps your odds a lot in this case. If the marker is really good on those 3 and you can have confidence of them being het pieds then you are down to an 87.5% chance that one or more of those three is also het albino. An excellent chance of having a double het albino pied female growing up already!

Of course you gave up the chance of producing albinos with that het female the last two years and I'm sure the het pied male and het albino female originally cost you a lot more than the $1,000 or so you might be able to get such a hatchling pair for now. However it just goes to show that with a little luck and persistency you don't have to spend tons of money to have a shot at something big.

I take it neither of the males produced in the last two years had the pied marker but that the het pied father did? What are you breeding the adult het albino female to this year? I'd be torn between breeding her to the het pied once more trying for a markered male and hopefully also a few more females or going for albino and using it to fund an unrelated 100% double het albino pied male. Would it take two albino's to purchase a for sure double het male in 05? It would certainly increase your odds over producing your own 50% chance het albino pied marker male and of course there is no guarantee you would even get one. With a for sure double het male your odds on having a shot would be back up around that 87% depending on how reliable the pied marker is. Of course you would still have the 1:16 odds per egg but at least you would have a good shot at it rather then cutting those odds in half with a 50% chance het albino male you produced. Still I bet the few double het albino pied males that MIGHT be for sale next year will be pricy.

Sorry for butting in, but what does a pied marker look like compared to a normal? I'm new to bp's so pleae excuse my ignorance if this is common knowledge.

Actually it's still widely contested and wasn't publicly known at all two years ago.

Many het and possible het pieds have a white belly all three scales across (not just the big middle scale) with relatively straight, thick, solid black lines along the edges of the last third of the belly. It reminds me of the pied with the white starting up from the belly and belly edge lines corresponding to the two black lines in the pigmented areas of the pieds.

So I'm guessing they're are pied hets without the markings, and normals with the markings then? This is a link to a pic from Kingsnake showing a BP lower belly. I appoligize to Tony Hurt for snagging the pic, but I just sent $ to buy the snake in the pic, so I don't feel tooo terrible. I see 1 black line across at the far left side. Good sign or bad? He's advertised as 66%.

http://market.kingsnake.com/image/305711.jpg

Again, sorry for hijacking.

sorry, grammer bugs me. Should read "there are" rather than "they're". I've got to stop typing after a few beers