hi this is keith i am woundering what are the true meaning to hypos and hets in the reptile world.any info would be appreciated.
"Hypo" means lessened. "Hyper" means more. Generally "Hypo" means hypomelanistic (in the snake world - such as Hypomelanistic Corn Snakes). Melanin is the dark colour pigment that produces black and shading in colours. So "Hypomelanistic" means lessened black pigment. "Hypermelanistic" means MORE black pigment. Amelanistic is "Albino" (also resulting in red eyes). Hypomelanistic is "less black". Now, these terms seem to have shot from being genetic inheritable traits (as with Hypo in corns) to being used for any pale specimen (in a lot of species including leopard geckos). I don't know if there's a proven "Hypo" gene in Leopard geckos, as there is with Blizzard, Patternless, etc. and the trait seems to be a line bred trait (basically you just keep putting together paler and paler animals and keep your fingers crossed that all u'r babies will end up light). "Het" is an abbreviation for Heterozygous. It means that an animal carries a gene for a particular trait, but it is not visibly evident. That is, you can breed a perfectly normal leopard gecko to a patternless leopard gecko. All the babies will LOOK normal, but will be "het" for patternless (they'll carry the patternless gene). If you breed those babies back to each other, or to other leos that are also het for patternless, you've got a good chance of having some babies that will be completely patternless (getting the recessive gene from each of the het parents). Having hets really doesn't do much though unless you're going for combinations. Say, Patternless & Albino. You mix those together, you get all normal looking babies that carry both the patternless & albino genes. That's called a double het. You mix those babies together, you've got like a 1 in 64 chance of getting a full blown Patternless Albino baby. Once you've got a pair of Patternless Albinos though, if you breed 'em together, they'll produce 100% patternless albino babies. An animal carrying a genetic trait (patternless, albino, blizzard, etc.) and visibly displaying it (inheriting the gene from both parents), is known as homozygous.
No problem Keith, I just try to read as much as I can. I'm hoping to get a glossary type thingemy up on here at some point, so I'll be sticking all these terms in there.
