Heh, no offense taken. I get people mixed up now and again too. Just wait till you get "old." LOL
Ya, Charcoal is sometimes also referred to as Anery type B. The reason they are called type A and B because they are independent of each other, just like Amel is independent of Anery. Cornsnakes actually have tens of thousands of genes, and they have several "switches" in the process of making red pigments that can shut down the whole works.
The two "Anery types" are just two of the genes we've stumbled across that can flip some switch somewhere that allows us to see a difference in their colors. Charcoal and Anery can look similar by themselves, but don't let that (and the similar names) fool you into thinking they have some connection to each other.
The big differences between them are much more obvious when you compare Snow (Anery Amel) to Blizzard (Charcoal Amel)
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Most of the "combinations" are simply the adding of two or more effects. For example, Caramel drastically reduces red and increases yellows. Add Amel to that, and you've got an amel that has a lot less red and a lot more yellow. These are the "butter" corns. Sounds like you've got that down already, eh?
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it's the part with morphs off of morphs that confuses me, like what is a candy cane, a small c where as anery's are e's and amels are a's?
You know that Amelanism is an "on/off" trait. It's either on with "aa" (no melanin)
...or off "AA" or "Aa" (there's melanin, the black/brown pigment.)
Certain morphs like Candycane, Reverse Okeetee, and Sunglow are the results of amelanism added to "selective breeding" rather than another single on/off trait.
What I mean is this:
Forget about all the letters and punnett squares and that junk for a bit... (wow, ME saying THAT! LOL)
Take a huge pile of amel corns from all over the place. You will notice that some of them are more orange than others. Some have a lighter or yellower ground color. There's a whole lot of variation in them, right?
Say you pick out the two with the most "white-ish" background colors, and breed them together. In their offspring, you will eventually get ones with even
more of a white-ish ground color. Rinse-repeat, for generations and generations, and you will eventually (hopefully) end up with amelanistic corns that have
totally white ground colors. These are the ideal "candycanes," and that's one way to make them.
Amelanism is caused by one gene, as you know. But remember that corns have tens of thousands of genes. There are a lot of genes which affect a little bit of variation in color and pattern here and there. Some give or take a little orange, some make the borders a little wider or thinner, some make it more or less yellow, etc.
If you were to put all of those genes into terms of paired letters, you'd need a whole lot more alphabets to cover it all. It's also basically impossible to isolate one certain gene that might add 1% more orange to the ground color, so we really have no names or letters to assign to these hundreds of genes at this point.
It's too much to keep track of... even if you DID know what was going on with all those genes, imagine trying to draw out a 100 by 100 punnett square, and then trying to figure out which of your hatchlings fit whatever outcome you were supposed to "expect." hehehe
So instead you just go by overall looks:
"This one has less orange, I'll use it in the next generation."
What you're doing through the "selective breeding" process is actually selecting for these larger combinations of genes all at one time with each keeper you select.
You're not selecting a particular square in the punnett like you do with snows... you're selecting the one that is closest to that corner over there where you've got all the "no orange" genes piled up together.
The closer they are to the look you want, the more genes "in your favor" that you've probably gathered into one animal... and of course, that individual is going to pass down more of those "favorable" genes to its offspring than some ordinary run-of-the-mill specimen.
That's what is behind the variations of Amels that we all know as Candycanes, Sunglows, and Reverse Okeetees. They're all amels, but with that "extra something" thrown in.
The same type of selective breeding is done (either by breeders or by natural conditions in the wild) to create the Miami and Okeetee types of variations that are different from "normal" normals.
And since those "extra" looks are created by so many genes, when you mix the results of one selective breeding with another (say Sunglow X Candycane) you will get a whole mess of stuff that is everything in between each of the parents. (The hatchlings would tend to look like "regular" amels.)
Does that make sense? (I'm known to ramble, hehe, so if you have more questions, ask away.
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