Hehehe… I did not think I was going to respond anymore in this thread but some of the details surrounding this issue has continued to bug me….so Im trying to wrap my mind around it….
Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about ramshorns snail genetics.
Mustafa wrote:
No reason to feel like a "doofus."
We are all here to share information and learn from each other. Being corrected is part of the learning process.
Yea I know....but I still feel like a doofus because its something that I could have easily checked on before I posted
zwergkrebszuechter wrote:
red is a recessive trait, yes.
While red, blue, pink, green etc usually breeds true, you will get other colors for quite a while if your snail had contact to snails of other colors.
Are you sure about this?….Could ramshorns pigment be polygenic in nature? Or some other inheritance mode?
When you say the red is recessive are you saying that snail pigment follows simple inheritance principals? Or did you say that knowing that snail pigment genetics is more complicated and involves other inheritance principals but due to certain factors can for most practical purposes be considered simple?
I have about a dozen "tanks" with red ramshorns....I say "about a dozen tanks" because some are large fish bowls or mini indoor ponds...All of them are filled with red ramshorns. "Long ago" when I only had one 20 gallon fish tank I bought a couple red ramshorns. As these snails multiplied I got more tanks and things. With any new "tank" I set up, I populated it with offspring ramshorns from that original 20 gallon tank.
I know that it is very easy for hitchhiker snails or eggs to get into tanks when things are added like plants, rocks, foreign water....or whatever.
But.....The tank that these brown ramshorns sprang up in has had no "outside" influences. The plants in the tank came from cuttings that came from that original 20 gallon tank. Same goes for the guppies and crayfish that are in the tank, all from that original 20 gallon. Water changes done with treated tap water. So in the tank that the brown ramshorns appeared I can say with a great deal of certainty that they have had no contact with snails other than the red ones from that 20 gal. That means this would not be a case of stored sperm unless a snail can store both red and brown snail sperm then use the red sperm and give the brown sperm to the offspring as a going away present for future use.
So I would think that if simple inheritance is involved and the red is recessive I would have seen brown ramshorns in at least some of my other tanks...and the tanks that the brown ramshorns are in would slowly become dominated by
almost entirely brown ramshorns....
So if the red is the direct manifestation of a of a single recessive gene that codes for red that would mean that I had a mutation in that locus and this mutation is either identical to the wild type brown gene or is visually indistinguishable from the wild brown.
(I pretty sure this would only be applicable if the pigment of ramshorns is determined by a single loci)
People say that they have ramshorns with shells of one color and flesh of another color. If simple and recessive how would one get red snail flesh and brown shell?...This made me think that pigment for these snails is more complicated, unless the ramshorns have two loci for color that are not closely linked (or other factors are involved). So that when a brown and a red mate the offspring get one set for the shell and one set for the fleshy part and crossover occurred causing the offspring to get a recessive red gene pair for flesh and a dominant brown trait in the shell….
*grumbles* I better stop talking now because not only is my inheritance knowledge limited but its also very rusty. hahaheheh erm…
Okay so these are the scenarios I can generate to explain the brown so far.
Simple Inheritance: The brown is a mutation that is either identical to the wild type ramshorns or indistinguishable from it.
The overall pigment is some sort of polygenic effect and the small population that started that tank carried more of certain sets of genes related to pigment resulting in this distribution of red and brown.
Some sort of interaction between modifying and regulator genes.
Maybe the brown snails are appearing in that one tank because of the incomplete penetrance of this particular brown trait in my red ramshorns snail population (this brown trait being different from the normal one seen in the wild). Just a random idea…..probally unlikely or maybe impossible...I dunno
Any other possibilities Im missing?
So how badly did I screw up….? Did I totally mess up the principals of inheritance?….. Please correct me where needed.