Masking?!

[danghise]

Hi,
i am from Germany (so sorry for my bad English) and want to breed some Anery Lavender and out of them some Snow Lavender.
First of all I thought this is a great idea and that the hatchlings must be awesome. But now I read about "masked" corns and I am not sure about what it exactly means.
I think it means that one of the colors dominates the other. Is this correct?

If yes: What color is "stronger" then the others?

Lavender > Anery
Charcoal > Anery
Hypomel > Amel

I don't think it is that easy, is it?

Which combinations of which genes will result in a masked corn snake?

And what should I expect when I am going to breed some Lavender Snow? Snow or Opal?

Best regards,
Daniel

 

[Kat]

The term 'masked' means that one set of homozygous genes causes a second set to not be expressed, even though normally they would be. (The technical term is epistasis.) So yes, your assessment is correct.

Unfortunately it's not as simple as X always masks Y. What tends to happen is something more along the lines of X masks Y except when Z is also present... or X mostly masks Y, but there are some subtle differences...

Lavender does not quite mask Anery. Anery Lavenders have a different look from true Lavs. I'm unsure how adult Snopals (Anery Lav + Amel) look, but the hatchlings more resemble snows than anything else. Charcoal does mask Anery by itself... I don't know if that changes when amel is added... Amel masks Hypo (not the other way around), but hypo can cause a more sunglow-like appearance in amels, and more orangy-pink color in snows.

Confused yet?
Basically, if a color gene combo hasn't been confirmed yet, there's no way to predict what will mask what, or what the combined effect will be. (Pattern morphs are much more predictable.) Furthermore, different bloodlines can have different effects. The same gene bred into Miami lines produces a different look than when it's bred into okeetee lines, for example.

Viel Glűck!

-Kat

 

[Serpwidgets]

Lavender does not quite mask Anery. Anery Lavenders have a different look from true Lavs.

Yeah, and even this isn't always true. :grin01: Some confirmed anery lavs are totally indistinguishable from regular lavenders. But we've all seen the few anery lav (and/or suspected anery lav) youngsters that do have that "tweener" look too. I'm curious to see what hypo does to them.

Charcoal seems to mask anery when amel is present, since the result is a blizzard-looking snake. A few of us are looking into a hypothesis that charcoal + anery + hypo causes super-light phantoms, but proof is still a ways off.

And yeah, amel masks the most obvious effect of hypomelanism, the color change. I don't think anyone has shown a clutch of amels and hypo amels where they can pick out the hypos, so for all practical purposes it is easiest just to assume that hypo will be masked by amel in your clutches.