filial

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Posted by Chris_Harper2 on January 20, 2003 at 10:35:59:

In Reply to: F1 F2 F3??? posted by lynex17 on January 18, 2003 at 01:18:47:

The terms F1, F2 etc. do not necessarily imply than first or second generation produced in captivity. This in the common meaning in herpetoculture, however.

The terms F1, F2 etc. are used to imply the first, second generation etc. born in any specific breeding project. Given that almost anything can be classified as a specific breeding project, the terms can be completely arbitrary.

Also, animals can be F1's in one sense but F3's in another.

Let's say you had a male and female cornsnake that were both wild caught and were colored "normally". Now let's say you had another pair of cornsnakes that were wildcaught with some sort of single gene recessive mutation. For the simplicity of this example we'll say amelanistic.

If you bred the WC "normal" pair to together the resultant offspring produced would be F1's. Breed those together and you have F2 captive born cornsnakes.

Do the same thing with the WC amelanistic pair and you have F2 captive born snakes that happen to be amelanistic.

Now if you breed one of the F2 "normals" to one of the F2 amelanistic snakes the resultant offspring would be F3 captive born snakes but also be F1 heterozygotes. So they could be called both F1's and F3's.

Now if you bred those heterozygotes together the resultant offspring would be a mess.

First, all the snakes would be F4 captive born snakes.

The homozygous dominates could be called F1 homozygous dominants or they could be called F3 HD's as they were the previous result of two generations of normal animals.

The heterozygous animals produced could be called F2 heterozygotes.

The albinos produced could called F1 albinos or they could be called F3 albinos since they were the previous result of two generations of albinos.

There are actually more layers of complexity to this but this should give a general idea of how these terms are used in herpetoculture.

Also understand that most of the offspring produced in this hobby cannot be classified to discrete filial's. This is obviously due to the fact that many breeders will breed in wild caught animals to their animals that are multiple generation captive born.

For example, I plan to breed an F1 captive born Gonyosoma to a WC specimen. The offspring really cannot be called F1's or F2's.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

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