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Posted by rtdunham on August 09, 2002 at 08:24:50:
In Reply to: \ posted by patricia sherman on August 09, 2002 at 04:22:18:
I liked your comments but i 'd like to follow up on one thing:
you say a "hypo" is an animal that can produce black, but that exhibits very little of it "due to greatly reduced areas of black within the pattern." That can be interpreted either of two ways and in fact diff people seem to interpret "hypo" two different ways, so i think pursuing the ideas might improve our thinking/terminology/whatever...
Interpretation #1:
the black is the same intense black as always but there's less of it. This is descriptive of a PATTERN morph.
Interpretation #2
the black is less intense--typically reduced to brown (someone else observed that melanin can produce both brown and black pigments, and i think they're correct, so most of what we're calling hypos would be animals that have the production of black by melanin turned off but the brown--or some of it-- remaining. This type of hypo would be a COLOR morph.. (if BOTH brown and black melanin-producing cells are turned off you have no melanin, and as you've observed, you have an amelanistic).
I think hypomelanistic should refer to the color morph and not the pattern morphs. there's variability in all wild-type snakes, especially in pattern variations (consider the black bordering the red blotches on red rats, for example). Should non-okeetee red rats, with narrower black borders, be called hypos? I don't think so, especially since there's a true hypo color morph in that ssp. But even if there weren't, those pattern differences seem to be polygenic, and the labels we use are best when describing changes produced by a single inherited gene trait.
What do you think?
peace
terry
