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Posted by patricia sherman on August 10, 2002 at 00:29:42:
In Reply to: a followup question, tricia... posted by rtdunham on August 09, 2002 at 08:24:50:
I think that you raise excellent points, and that you may well be correct. I like the suggestion that there may be polygenetic factors governing the production of melanin. We can produce brown by mixing red and black, and the intensity of the brown shade can be varied by introducing more or less of the black to the red. This could very well be what is happening with the snake colours. Some factors are acting to inhibit full expression of the black, so it deteriorates to brown.
Tricia
: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?
