Reptile Forum, Reptile Classifieds - CaptiveBred

[Gimpy]

This may seem like a dumb question but does anyone actually know how many (regular) morphs of crestie there are? By regular i mean not something that will cost millions and trillions of pounds or any new morphs that only a handful of people would know! I hope I'm making sense here!? And if possible could you give examples??
No real reason for this I'm just very interested in morph genetics and patterns etc. Cheers

[crouchy]

well this is a hard question to answer as some people debate as to whether they are really morphs at all or just natural variations.

Its gets even more complicated with things like harlequins sort of being a slightly more extreme version of a fire.

Depending on which way you look at it there are either no morphs at all with just differing patterns or there are quite a few morphs probably 12 or so

[Gimpy]

hmmm okey dokey!
trust me to ask a well, (would-be) complicated question! Lol

[Ace]

don't quote me on this as i may be wrong but as far ass i understand it the genetics behind crested gecko morphs are yet to be proven one way or another. generally speaking if you put two (lets say as an example harlequin) cresties together you are most likely to produce harlequin cresties as offspring. however it begs the question is this simply line breeding or is it direct variations of different allele's at the same locus in the cresties DNA. as far as i understand it there are no dominant or co-dominant traits and there are no recessive traits its all a matter of line breeding to enhance variations that already occur within the captive population. therefore it is not possible to produce cresties such as a heterozygous harlequin from the mating of a harlequin and a buckskin, you will simply end up with another crestie that shows harlequin tendencies but probably not as strong as the harlequin parent. one factor that is worth noting is that the "Dalmatian" trait appears to be independent to the other coulour pattern differences and therefore can be combined to produce a harlequin Dalmatian for example.
all this said it is thought that the crested gecko is the most polychromatic of all gecko species (comes in the most natural colour and pattern variations). so therefore it may be a case that the colour and pattern differences are directly coded for by individual genes but until someone sets out a methodical test for this we will all be none the wiser about the specifics of the genetics behind the colour and pattern differences.

incase people are wondering the majority of this information can be found much better laid out in the book "Rhacodactylus, a complete guide to their captive care and selection", written by Allen Repashy, Pillipe De Vosjoli and Frank Fast.
i have summarized it a bit here and added in personal experience and information from other sources but this book is well worth a read when attempting to understand the different morphs of crestie along with a photo guide of all of the morphs recognized as of its release date in 2005.

cheers, will
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61 and counting

[Scott W]

[Geordiegirl]

[Gimpy]

cheers people, i shall defiantly check that book out.
Its a very interesting subject.

[Exalted Gecko]

That book is a bible on Rhacs and well worth a look.

The whole crestie debate is interesting, but I hope they don't go the way of the leopard gecko and just have stupid amounts of morphs with new designer morphs cropping up that cost a s**t load!

I personally think this would be a bad thing for cresties, I have a lovely rust coloured female and I couldn't care less what 'morph' it is
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Kind Regards,

Chris

[funky]

Im the same, Only just got into Cresties, but Im not bothered on the morph, I think they are fascinating things.