Alright!.....Who do I complain to?.....

I crossed my amel het Caramel and Motley (Butter Motley) with a Caramel het amel and Motley (Butter Motley) and got 8 eggs.

From those 8 eggs I got 3 normals, 3 Caramels, 1 amel and 1 Butter. NONE of which are Motley!

I've been ripped off!

Someone has to be held responsible!

The only two I can think of to blame is................

Lady Luck

or

Murphy

oh man.....that is really bad luck....hope that next year you'll have better luck when breeding these two together....or if you want send them to me and I'll breed them and we'll see if there are any butter motleys for me....lol

good luck with them again next year!

Apparently, one is, or both are, not het for motley. Did they come from your stock? If not, then you got ripped off.

It's just bad luck with the odds......

This is the male that sired both parents of the clutch.


Het to het will usually produce 25% of the het trait as homozygous. In this case, out of 8 eggs, only 2 would be Motley, statistically.

It's just a case of bad luck that none of the offspring were Moltey.

I was just being goofy.

Yeah, that's a tough break, Clint.

A few months back, I was at the track and got a bit of enlightenment (after all, all things are connected, are they not?).
With all due respect to all you genetics geniuses, this 25%, 50%,
and so on, might be better viewed as racing odds. Rather than saying a hatch will be 25% this, or 50% that, it seems to be more in keeping with race-track odds, as in: 2 to 1, 4 to 1, 16 to 1, 32 to 1, and so on. I might even bet on a horse with 2 to 1 odds of winning, or even 4 to 1, but lets say the odds of winning were 16 to 1, or 32 to 1. I'd keep my money in my pocket, but with snakes, I've made that gamble before.

Sorry to hear about your horse not winning, Clint. Maybe next time.

yep, that's a motley alright...

nice snake. I've always like that morph.

Clint,

I have often had people ask me just why in the heck I work with so many animals and produce so many darn eggs. I think you see now why. The ONLY way I have found to be able to give myself a fighting chance at beating bad luck and Murphy's Law is by trying to overpower them both with overwhelming numbers.

This year I had two clutches hatch out where I bred a Hypo Blood Red to a Blood Red female het for Hypo. In one clutch I got NO Hypo Blood Reds, which really bummed me out. Just today (after getting back from Daytona Beach), I checked on the other clutch and had ALL Hypo Blood Reds from that second clutch. Statistically, combining both clutches, I was right on the money with the odds of what to expect from the TOTAL production of those two clutches.

But it was a heck of a way to do it.

Also, consider this little wrinkle: Statistically, you should get a pretty even 50/50 split for a sex ratio. So remember that when you are congratulating yourself for being so lucky as to get all females some year. Sooner or later the statistics will balance out the score on you. Probably at a VERY inconvenient time and circumstance, by giving you ALL males.

It's all in numbers. If you produce enough clutches, you can pretty much be guaranteed to have a balance of good and bad luck in your hatchings. The trick is to focus on the good ones and try not to dwell too long on the bad ones.

A good piece of advice............

It's just too bad I don't have the time or resources to hammer out the numbers it takes to beat the odds.

I guess I just need to narrow by attentions, but dang!

Some projects will just have to take priority and others........well, they'll just have to find new advocates! For now

(Heh, edit... wrong numbers... it's too late to think straight.)

BTW, Clint's odds on getting zero motleys from a het X het with 8 eggs (all other things being equal) was 1 in 10.

Conversely, the odds of getting exactly 2 motleys (the most likely outcome) was only 1 in 3.21, which is a measley 31%.

Translated, in the big picture about two thirds of clutches of that nature and size will not match the "expected" outcome. The smaller the clutch, the more "wacky" your results will tend to be, good or bad.

I think the worst case is to start out having the best luck in the world. From there it's all too easy to have skewed expectations from then on and be eternally disappointed, even when you're doing well.