Question: How to identify leucistic larvea

helobed

helobed

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Well I've never had any leucistic larvae before but suspect that there might be some in my current batch. I heard that leucistic start out with normal colorization and slowly get paler, but how long until you can tell for sure???

Mine are beginning to get their front legs atm and some of them seem slightly paler than the others of their 'colour type' but this could just be to natural variety I suppose. Both parents are non-lecusitic but could easily carry the gene.

Anyone had experience with this???

Thanks
 
Ooops, posted in wrong section... too many tabs open at once.
could some kind person help me move it???
 
leucistics will look like wild types when little, and as they grow you will start to notice they look less green than the wild types and more pale... if it is darker with no green its probably just a dark wild. Leucistic larva often have lighter bands on their back too, where wild types will look more even.

My fist batch had a few leucistics and lots of wild, and my second had lots of leucistic and not so much wild. The first batch it took a while for the leucistics to show, the second it was quite obvious from the start, so i guess it depends
 
In Leucistics the pigment should only be on the tops of their heads and down their backs. If they have dark spots lower on their sides or on their legs (when they have them) they are probably not leucistic.

Have a look at the 3 larvae at the very bottom of this page... it may help. The Leucistic is the first of the 3 and the wild is the 3rd
http://www.ambystoma.de/html/axolotl/axolotl_development.html
 
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i have a question too about that site you linked then, ill quote the part im confused about in stage 1

"The egg shown here is laid by a leucistic female so there is some kind of seperation between a white and a darker colored part (albinos eggs are completely white in the beginning, eggs from wild females mostly dark)."

well, iv never had axies breed before, and last night my wild type layed eggs, white eggs... what does that mean?? lol should they be brown?
 
@MereB
Thanks, still wondering though.None of mine seem to match up to the leucistic pic there but there are definitely white albinos and a lighter and darker shade of wildtype so perhaps the melanoid gene, although I can't see a lack of iridiophores around the eyes in any of them??? Only time will tell, as I think yellowpebble said it can take more or less time to start to loose pigment


@suzie
Is your'wild type' what they call an olive or a copper by any chance? This lot of babies ought to tell me for sure, but I have been theorizing that coppers/olives are actually a different partial form of albinism, (I won't go into the details unless you ask.) Which would match as people have claimed to have white eggs from a copper before.
 
well i dont know!! lmao i have no idea.... ummm.... here's a pic...

this is her in the old tank, its the best one that shows her colors...

P200811_1845.jpg
 
sorry, my internet's funny and I can't see it unless its a thumbnail

would you be able to add it as an attachment?

Edit:
- Actually scratch that found a pic of you girly. Hard to tell because of the blurryness but I would say copper. If you want to make sure yourself have a close up look at her pupils, if she's a copper then they ought to be red in the middle due to lack of melanin (easiest to tell if you shine a light, although a bit cruel :() and if she's a wild type then they ought to be completely black in the middle.

At the moment I don't think coppers are recognized as an 'official' pigment effecting gene but I am gathering evidence. Almost there :happy:.
 
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Yes she is a dark copper. You can usually tell because they seem more rusty brown as apposed to green brown, and they have a very noticable white ring around the outside of the eye. If you look closley at the "black" dot in the middle, especially in the light, you should see it is actually a deep red colour. Coppers are actually a type of albino, supprisingly, dispite their sometimes VERY dark pigmentation. A few of us have bread coppers before with a high percentage albino larva (meaning they have to be a/a for albanism, a true albino) or only albinos when copper was bread with another albino. and they do lay white eggs.





http://www.caudata.org/forum/f46-be...ding/77614-dark-female-laying-white-eggs.html

“Coppers, as they call them down under, are albinos bred to have unusually high counts of iridophores and to an extent, a decent crop of xanthophores. In other words they are very, very dark xanthic albinos. I wish I could get these here in the States. I have drooled over their beauty for years.”


http://www.caudata.org/forum/f46-be.../77537-genetics-my-babies-multi-coloured.html


http://www.caudata.org/forum/f46-be...ssion-free-all/72854-colour-named-copper.html

http://www.caudata.org/forum/f46-be...scussion-free-all/75753-australian-olive.html
 
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... sorry to hijack your thread about leucustic Larva!!! :D

its cool to know they only look "wild" on their backs... which makes sence since their dark freckles are always located there due to genetics.
 
yellowpebble said:
Coppers are actually a type of albino, supprisingly, dispite their sometimes VERY dark pigmentation. A few of us have bread coppers before with a high percentage albino larva (meaning they have to be a/a for albanism, a true albino) or only albinos when copper was bread with another albino. and they do lay white eggs.


“Coppers, as they call them down under, are albinos bred to have unusually high counts of iridophores and to an extent, a decent crop of xanthophores. In other words they are very, very dark xanthic albinos. I wish I could get these here in the States. I have drooled over their beauty for years.”
Click to expand...

I'm sorry :( , I know its not yours, but the axanthic-albino hypothesis just doesn't make sense. [WARNING: this next bit might get a bit biological.. sorry :(]

The axanthic gene actively suppresses the production of xanthrophores (yellow pigment) as well as somewhat suppressing iridophores (shiny), thus axanthic-albinos lack both melanin and xanthrophores - resulting in a white individual with red eyes. While they may accumulate a cream tinge over time due to riboflavins in their diet this cannot be selectively bred as it is environmental, nor does selectively breeding for increased xanthrophore count make sense as as xanthrophores fail outright in xanthics due to the absence of a vital enzyme in their conversion pathway. And even if this somehow was possible xanthrophores in A.mexicanum are only yellow, thus an increased count of xanthrophores would in no way produce a copper tinge, nor would a hyperexpression of iridiophores as they would just make the axie almost white with shiny pigment (as seen in one of Jay Sommers axies).

[Ok, crazy biology aside and back to more slightly normalish stuff]

I should probably start another thread about this, but I have been conducting some research and tests as to this theory and (at least for the light olive/copper axies I have trialed) I have found that there is, in fact, a gene, separate to to the more familiar albino gene, that results in the copper phenotype through a gradual buildup in a partial product in the conversion pathway to melanin. (they basically get further along the pathway to melanin than golden albinos but not all the way)

I'm going to wait until I have all the evidence at hand until I make any claims as to the exact inheritance pattern (codominace, linkage, independent autosomal..etc). But purely speculating, it seems that the 'copper gene' is independent to traditional albinism at this stage. More substantial evidence will be available in a month or so when I have identified all phenotypes of my current batch and conducted statistical analysis against the data.
 
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yellowpebble said:
... sorry to hijack your thread about leucustic Larva!!! :D

its cool to know they only look "wild" on their backs... which makes sence since their dark freckles are always located there due to genetics.
Click to expand...

Nah, no worries it seems to have degenerated anyways into a discussion about coppers ;)

The wild ones in my batch seem to be in two varieties, not pale and paler all over quite evenly... I'll just have to wait
 
your pale "yellow" wilds might turn out to be copper, mine did
 
Oh, I have plenty of coppers, some of them are beginning to get a bit paler too now so maybe leucistic after all
 
ok so wow! that's pretty interesting, and here i was thinking she was a wild type lol! so.. the eggs she layed, what will they be? albinos? golden albinos? coppers? what's the colour guesses? and can they turn out/into wild types or melanoid's? and im also soz about turning this thread into one about coppers too lol! also, are coppers rare? or just another different type? :D
 
Don't worry about the topic, coppers are a particularly interesting colour so its all good.
Coppers do seem to be more common in Aus compared to other countries. As for the babies we really would need to know what color the father is???
 
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well... i had originally planed to breed my golden albino male with my leucistic female...
so i had them set up in the breeding tank, in my main tank i had my melanoid male with well my "copper" female lol
then nothing much was happening, so i decided if i separated the two i wanted to mate, that might work... so i switched females... cos the boys don't get along together good lol then... a few days after switching my copper layed eggs in the breeding tank!.. so.... i have no idea who the daddy is haha it could be ether of the males! but i only found spermatophore's in the breeding tank.. but i might have just missed some in the main tank.... so i really don't know! haha ... but my golden male is prob the daddy cos he had the spermatophore in the tank he was in, and he was doing all the mating dances, where as the melanoid male hasn't really done anything at all in a while lol
 
Ok, so assuming a golden albino x copper batch colors should be like this:


  • If neither of them carry any other recessive genes then all larvae should be wild type.

    If the male has a recessive copy of the t+ (copper) gene 1/2 should be copper

    If the female has a recessive copy of the a (albino gene) then 1/2 should be (golden) albino
Just as a note, if a larvae inherits both the copper and albino trait then it will in fact appear to be a normal (golden) albino

Now.... if both parents carry a recessive copy of the lecustic gene then you can expect 1/4 of the larvae to be lecustics of some variety (red or black eyes or copper eyes depending on the other genes)

Same if they both carry a recessive copy of the melanoid or axanthic gene (1/4)


Basically, expect all wild type, but really any colour is possible if you don't know the exact linage of your axies
 
ok great so prob some wilds! yay im hoping for some dark ones cos i already have 7 golden albino's lmao but anything will be good, i just want them healthy xD
 
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