i've ignored this too much, i need to figure out what exactly an ultramel is. now if that gene is codominant, then what is the super form of it...or is there one? if you breed an ultramel to a normal do you get 50% ultramels and 50% normals. and if you breed two ultramels together what do you get? and im under the impression that since this is new you can basically breed any gene into it, like have an ultramel anery or caramel or something?
First off, you'll be better off if you forget you ever heard the term "super". :grin01: What people usually mean by "super" is the homozygous form of a codominant or dominant gene to normal. Yes, I said "or dominant" because most of them don't seem to know the difference between what a dominant and codominant gene is and assume that anything showing up as a morph in the het version is "codominant" without ever proving out whether it's dominant (2 phenotypes possible, normal and morph= het and homo look alike) or codominant (3 phenotypes possible, normal, het, and homo). They've taken to calling animals het for either type of gene "codominant" and homo for either type of gene "super" or "dominant" (Whether or not the animal looks different than its het counterpart) which is just shooting their understanding of genetics in the foot.
Also keep in mind when you are describing a gene as recessive, codominant, or dominant, that relationship only exists between 2 different genes (alleles) at one locus. Most of the time, when you just call a gene recessive (or codominant, etc.), you are referring to the way it interacts with the normal/wild type allele at that locus. So, in cornsnakes, comparing mutant to wild type, the following is a list of "types" of genes:
Amel - recessive
Ultra - recessive
Anery - recessive
Charcoal - recessive
Caramel - recessive
Hypo - recessive
Motley - recessive
Stripe - recessive
Z - recessive
Lavender - recessive
Sunkissed - recessive
Lava - recessive
Diffusion - variably codominant (has a tendency to express partial pattern in hets)
Several of the above recessives have some tendency to alter their hets somewhat (such as caramel, motley, hypo, sunkissed, possibly lava), but not enough to reliably pass the "brown bag test" of picking hets from mixed clutches. They may be very weakly codominant, but for all intents and purposes we call them recessives.
Some of these genes actually act on the same loci (space on the chromosome), so they are alleles to each other. They are:
Motley & Stripe
Ultra & Amel
From what we've seen so far, Motley seems to dominate Stripe, so an animal carrying one Motley gene and one Stripe gene should look Motley.
Ultra and Amel seem to be truly codominant to each other. An ultramel is an animal that carries one ultra gene and one amel gene, creating a morph intermediate between an ultra (which is about as dark as a standard hypo) and an amel (which lacks melanin entirely).
So, is ultra codominant? Yes...to amel. Is ultra recessive? Yes...to normal. Is ultra dominant? Not to anything we've seen thus far.
The same can be said of amel. It's recessive to normal, codominant to ultra.
If you breed an ultramel (au) to a normal with no hets (AA), you would get all normals het for EITHER amel OR ultra (Aa or Au) since the ultramel carries one copy of each and the normal doesn't carry either gene.
If you breed 2 ultramels together, you would get uu, ua, au, aa...1/4 ultra (uu), 2/4 ultramel (au, ua), and 1/4 amels (aa).
Ultra and Ultramel can be combined with other morphs, just like amel, anery, etc. can be combined. We'll be seeing plenty of such combos in the near future.
