What is a Het ?
Quite often when you see Snakes for sale you will notice some being sold as "Het" amel or "Het" Anery and the novice snake keeper may not know what a "het" is what it does or why its important to be fair its only really important if you wish to breed and or are looking to produce certain "morphs" in which case hets are extremely important and will play a big role in your projects..
The most basic and literal defintion of a het is Het – heterozygous. A genetic term meaning that reptile carries a recessive gene for a morph. A het snake can appear completely normal, yet still pass on the gene for a certain morph to it’s offspring
To make a specific visual colour or pattern.
The hatchlings must inherit heterozygous genes for that particular pattern from each parent or if your talking about a 2 gene snake eg Snow they must inherit genes for each pattern that makes that particular morph it takes 2 recessive genes to make a pattern Homozygous eg visually apparent.
For arguments sake lets say you wanted to Breed out a Snow corn a Snow corn is made up of two morphs Amelanistic (often shortened to amel) which will remove the black pigment and Anerythristic (often shortened to anery) which removes the red pigment combining the two results in a Snow which displays both traits visually you can achieve it one of two ways you can have one parent that is already a snow and one that is a Normal (or any other morph) "Het" Anery and Amel or you could use two het snakes you will obviously have a much higher chance of producing snows if you dont use the latter method but either method should result in snows unless your unlucky enough to lose eggs during the incubation period or if the females lays a very small clutch or even worse lays slugs (infertile eggs)
The most basic and literal defintion of a het is Het – heterozygous. A genetic term meaning that reptile carries a recessive gene for a morph. A het snake can appear completely normal, yet still pass on the gene for a certain morph to it’s offspring
To make a specific visual colour or pattern.
The hatchlings must inherit heterozygous genes for that particular pattern from each parent or if your talking about a 2 gene snake eg Snow they must inherit genes for each pattern that makes that particular morph it takes 2 recessive genes to make a pattern Homozygous eg visually apparent.
For arguments sake lets say you wanted to Breed out a Snow corn a Snow corn is made up of two morphs Amelanistic (often shortened to amel) which will remove the black pigment and Anerythristic (often shortened to anery) which removes the red pigment combining the two results in a Snow which displays both traits visually you can achieve it one of two ways you can have one parent that is already a snow and one that is a Normal (or any other morph) "Het" Anery and Amel or you could use two het snakes you will obviously have a much higher chance of producing snows if you dont use the latter method but either method should result in snows unless your unlucky enough to lose eggs during the incubation period or if the females lays a very small clutch or even worse lays slugs (infertile eggs)
