Tiger Striped Jungles
Tiger-striped
Morelia cheynei: The mode of inheritance.
Briefly
outlined below is the approach I have used to produce the spectacular
tiger-striped jungles pictured on my website. I hope that reading this will
help others produce better tiger-striped jungles also.
First, I
mated a male normal (i.e. non-striped) jungle to a female tiger-striped jungle.
Unfortunately none of the offspring (F1) from this mating had the tiger-striped
pattern displayed by the mother, thus ruling out Co-dominance as the mode of inheritance.
However, approximately 25% did have various amounts of partial striping and I
believed that these individuals were visible het for tiger-striped.
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Next, I mated
one of the male partially striped F1 offspring back to the mother (i.e. the
female tiger-striped jungle). This mating resulted in 16 offspring (F2), 4 of which
did display the tiger-striped pattern. The rest of the clutch consisted of 8
partially striped jungles (i.e. visible hets) and 4 normal looking individuals.
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Results from
my breeding program suggest that the tiger-striped trait in Morelia cheynei is most likely Polygenic .
Through selective line-breeding, that is breeding the offspring back to the
tiger-striped parent, you can consistently produce clutches with tiger-striped
jungles as I have done here.
I would just like to mention that when conducting such breeding programs, one must realise the importance of out crossing. I believe it is essential to strengthen the
vigour of the lines you are working with .
Roger Lester