Bearded Dragons are the most complicated, because
their coloration and patterns aren't just dominant and recessive, but all
are co-dominant and incomplete dominance. This means, say, if a sunburst and
sandfire breed, you don't just get some in between and one color is not
dominant over the other. You have to take in consideration the amount of
red, yellow, black, and white. White is the base color, then the visible
colors, then black is the top layer. Breeding a mostly orange (sandfire)
with a mostly yellow (sunburst) will give you some yellow, some orange, some
in between, then some with completely random coloration that may have stayed
dormant in the parents. There's no real way to determine what morphs any dragon
will produce unless you get them from a very reliant source.
The blood, sunburst, citrus, sandfire and whatever
other color morphs people make up all have to do with polygenics.
Polygenics is what makes hazel and green eyes in humans. A little brown,
a little blue, and you can get a new coloration. So say someone breeds a
Blood X Sunburst and gets an orange dragon. Then they call this a
sandfire and you buy it then breed it with a real sandfire and get
mostly reds and yellows. That is where the problems arise, because you
don't end up with all orange like you wanted. "Breeding color morphs is
like mixing paint."
Now for the other morphs: Leucisism,
Hypomelanism, Pastel, and Translucism are all real mutations.
Leucistic, Snow, and Pastel are all Hypomelanistic
traits, meaning they lack the dark or black pigment. Translucent dragons
lack white pigment and have solid black eyes. As babies, you can see
right through their belly!
Leucistic: White, No Pattern, Clear Nails.
Hypo: Lacks dark pigment, Clear Nails.
Pastel: Looks Hypo, but with Black Nails
Snow: Looks Leucistic, but with Black Nails
Now, when you breed a Hypo to a Leu, you should get a Double Het (DH),
but Dachiu crossed a Pastel to a Leucistic and produced all white
Beardies. This means that those are not two completely different genes,
and that they must be on the same locus. (A Locus is a part of a
chromosome, so if two traits are on the same "locus" think of them as
being located on the same street in a city)
What I will try to do next is make the whitest dragons
possible. It would be a two year breeding project, but I'm going to
cheat a little and buy some dragons already Het. But I will still
show how it would work from scratch:
Leucistic Snows and
Hypo Snows are the whitest Dragon possible, lacking virtually all
black pigment (except for the eyes)
FYI: Hypos are
Pastels, but Pastels are NOT Hypo.
