Questions for experienced panther breeders/researchers

[Rocky]

Ok, I have been looking into the breeding and what babies are produced and I have 2 questions about it.

1. Do genes really matter that much? When I say that I mean as in the colors the parents show off. Through looking around I have seen many different amazing parents for babies. Then you also see some saying he is the grandson of "so and so amazing panther" but the current father isn't as impressive as the grandfather. When I think about the litter size etc. I would think that there is going to be a huge diversity in how "stunning" the baby will turn out.

2. Since genes are shared by the parents I have a question that maybe someone who has studied chameleons in depth might know. Are the color intensities based on dominant/recessive genes? If so is there a way to tell if the female has received the dominant/recessive gene that makes them more attractive so you can hopefully pair a dominant gene male with a dominant gene female to get produce better quality offspring? This question also pertains to size etc.

Those are my only questions for now.
Thanks

edit: sorry for wall of text. Basically
1. Do genes pay a huge role in how the chameleon will look (besides the obvious ambilobe/ambanja/nosy be/ etc
2. If so, is there any way to tell a dominance in genes such as how they will look etc. so you can pair a dominant gene female with dominant gene male to produce better offspring?

 

[Drone]

The general subject to me is very interesting, but even if we were to limit our discussion to one feature, such as color, you would still find such a diversity that would make a broad topic difficult to narrow down in a forum thread.

there is body color, head/tail color, patterns, stripe color, accent colors, ect, ect.

Larador dogs, have fairly simple alleles that control their color.

Another good example is cattle, such as roan colored cattle, amoung other mixes.

I haven't found much, make that any, research done on the alleles that control the color of chameleons, nor would I know how to start. But I believe it is partially their great diversity that makes them so facinating to me (I am specifically referring to F. Pardalis, which so far I've only personally dealt with the Ambilobe localle.)

Speaking with other more experienced members has given me some ideas, and discounted others, but that's about as much as I've been able to find

the one exception I read on was transparent veilds, and the way they pass that trait on to their offspring....
there was a thread about it not too long ago but it was a pretty simple calulation of Codominance if I remeber right
R= reg, T=High Transparent, RT = semi transparent

| R R
T RT RT
T RT RT

| R T
R RR RT
T RT TT

 

[Vegas Chad]

And don’t forget to toss in Hets and double hets, dominant and co dominant. Its quite perplexing when you get into the nitty gritty of the genetics in morphs and color traits more so dragons than chameleons however maybe some day we will have hypo trans chameleons too

 

[Chameleon Company]

There are no definitive answers ....

We also may never know how different genes contribute. Much of what is known with other species, using ball pythons for example, is because genetic morphs exist, and when found, they can be inter-bred (brother to sister, father to daughter, etc.) to produce more. Not a successful proposition with chameleons.

Secondly, unless you bred it yourself, you do not know if A really came from B bred to C. You may be drawing conclusions based on false info. Our experience is that some color traits in some Locales breed more true than others. Blue-bar Ambilobes bred to blue-bar Ambilobes will produce a high percentage of blue-bar Ambilobes. Background colors seem not to follow any discernable pattern of expectation though. Red background Ambilobes seems to be more of a random trait than it is a predictable one. While we have produced some, most of what is produced by a red-to-red background breeding will not be red background. It'll be more to the yellow, common to that Locale.

The best way to get a colorful animal is to buy an animal that is showing color already, IMMHO. Happy hunting.