Quote Originally Posted by BUSHSNAKE View Post
this is what ive been told by Doug Wenzell(the guy who found them)...out of the wild he bred axanthic to normal and got hets. he bred axanthic to anery and got all axanthics...he bred the axanthics back to each other and then got both axanthics and aneries cuz the axanthics were het anery.
These breeding results are classic co-allelic pattern of two recessive alleles of the same gene. Axanthic (blue green -lets say we denote as "aa") and Anery (black and silver-lets denote "nn") are co-allelic, the same way that Candy and Albino are in ball pythons. A snake with two copies of the axanthic gene "aa" is blue green with lime dorsal phenotype, a snake with one copy axanthic and one copy anery "an" is blue and black phenotype, and a snake with two copies anery "nn" is the black and silver phenotype. I have been saying this for years. I think you realize this too, but the misnomer is just in how you say it as axanthic het anery. I think we are one the same page, we just don't speak the same language, but we both mean "an"
I agree with you that Scott was breeding visual axanthics to normal looking snakes that were either het for axanthic or het for anery, either way the resulting offspring from that breeding would result in 50% axanthics and the other 50% that were phenotypically normal and he was mistakenly assuming that was a co-dom result. When in fact what he was doing is just like if someone was breeding a candy ball python to a het albino- half the babies would come out looking like the candy parent and half would be normal, so one might think gee this must be a co-dom, when in fact it is just two recessive genes that are co-allelic.
I think the other thing that has muddied the water was the lack of recognition in the difference between the lighters blue green axanthics and the darker blue ones, which I believe are "aa" and "an" respectively.