Patternless and vanishing pattern questions!

"I do not know the genetic origin of Aztec in the trade".

AFAIK John Albrecht was one of the first to work with them, per Kathy L...

Thanks Chris.
It would be good to know what Aztec is genetically derived from.

I haven't heard from John or seen him around for years. There was a blurb in Kathy Loves Corn Snake book that mentioned he was one of the first to work with them, but no other info...

I PM'ed Kathy ; hopefully she'll come out & play.

Miss Kathy rules, hopefully she does Dave

Indeed she does.

"If you breed
motley with no other pattern hets X stripe with no pattern hets ,
you get all motley because motley is dominant to stripe.

Then you take one of those motley offspring and breed it X stripe with no pattern hets

Technically you should get back all motleys, but some may be visually striped, and they should be all motleys. But sometimes there is a gene of motley and a gene of stripe, one of each, and a homozygous motley stripe pops up, but you can only figure this out from test breeding to prove it out."

Dave, why do you hate me so much?

That's all good but, I wonder what would happen if you tried to put mascara on a cat?

It's actually been a LONG time since I worked with zigzag / Aztec corns. I think we were among the first to notice the zigzag pattern and selectively breed to increase it. But I think that John A. and Rich Z. might have gotten hold of some of the less curvy, more geometric looking Aztecs around the same time. I can't remember if Rich was the first one to call them Aztecs, though. I do remember that we started out with the same w.c. female from Pine Island that was the founder for the charcoal gene. She also had a few wavy, connected blotches. When we inbred to produce charcoal, we started getting more connected blotches, too. But early on in the project, most were ziggy for only about 15 - 25% of the body. So we started selecting for the ones with the ziggiest patterns and went from there. I assume that Rich and John and others with the straighter, more geometric patterned founders started in a similar way. But I would have to actually consult my book to jog the ol' memory at this time, lol!

I should mention that not all bloodlines were compatible. I once got a 95% ziggy corn from Mark Bell and bred it into my line of zigzags. But it never produced anything unusual. I assumed that meant that the broken patterns must be produced by different genes, which may vary in different bloodlines. But I never kept up on genetic work done by others once I got out of them, so my knowledge may be dated by now.

Thanks Kathy!!

Examples of various critters from J M G VP line.
One starts out with twin stripes but it turns into a single dorsal stripe, so it may be the beginning of a new pattern line, if it proves out.
Others show lack of pattern, or diminished pattern. One is sort of aztec-y looking, it is a "het vp".