Serzi's Journal

Ocrin 1, 1281

My name is Serzi and I am learning to write. These are my yeechi.

I didn't know what yeechi were until I got sent to a different world where there are Aelith who take care of the yeechi. Yeechi are like snakes, but with arms and horns and you're allowed to hold them. The snakes back home never let me hold them. I like yeechi more.

The top two are my first yeechi. Zoesthi is the orangey brown one and Ytise is the darker brown one. Both are wild type yeechi. The brown in their scales is a dominant trait.

Ytise made Phyrndes, who is all white. She is a leucistic morph. That means that she doesn't have any of the pigmentation markers. It also means Ytise can make more babies like Phyrndes, but Phyrndes was the only one in her clutch so she's special. Shifari says that leucistic and albino are two different types of morphs that make white yeechi. You can tell that Phyrndes is leucistic because she has blue eyes. She also has spots but you can't see them.

Astrimy is a suntan morph, which means she doesn't have a lot of phaeomelanin, so all of the melanin shows up stronger. Melanin codes for black and brown pigment, and phaeomelanin codes for red and yellow.

The peony and amber morphs are when the phaeomelanin shows up more than the melanin. So it's the opposite of Astrimy.

I don't have a peony or an amber yet, so I had to sneak some pictures of other people's yeechi.

The top one is a peony. It looks pink because of the phaeomelanin. The second one is Ampi, who is a combination of a peony and a dusty morph. So that's two recessive genes that showed up together and made a new colour. I got to name it and I called it rose.

Next is Dratah. She's a combination of peony and amber. I got to name her morph too and I called it sunset, because she looks like a sunset. I added an amber at the bottom to show how she's a blend of peony and amber.

Yeechi can also have pattern morphs. The top one is Thyrro and he has a tabby morph. He got it from Dratah, who got it from Zoesthi. That means that any clutches Dratah or Zoesthi have could make more tabbies if the dad is also a carrier of a tabby morph.

The next three are all normal spot patterns. Shifari says there's always going to be a little bit of variation in the spot patterning and none of them are unique enough to count as a morph.

That's all the patterns and morphs that I have right now. I'll keep adding more when I get more yeechi.

Thanks. Bye.

Serzi

Ocrin 2, 1281

I got three new yeechi! Phyrndes had a whole clutch of wild types. I think she might've been disappointed she didn't produce any more white babies like herself, but I'm not because that just means she's still the most special girl. I kept one. His name is Eofah.

There were some other clutches with new pattern morphs. The Aelith let me have one of the ribbon babies after they named the morph. He bit me and tried to escape. I named him Zaphe.

The other one is called a cobble morph because the spots are way bigger and more spaced out than the normal spots. Her name is Cydasa.

Shafari says that there's no more breedings for now, but that's okay because it gives my group time to grow up. Once they're older, I'm going to try to pair Zaphe with Dratah to see if I can get the pink colour with the ribbon morph. I think that would look really cool together.

Thanks. Bye.

Serzi

Ocrin 20, 1281

Okay! So! A lot has happened. I was going to pair Zaphe with Dratah because I wanted a pink ribbon, but then I started talking to Aethen and he explained a whole bunch about genetics that I didn't understand before.

I explained the suntan morph wrong before. It doesn't have extra phaeomelanin. It has extra of everything. It's like hyper pigmented. Smoke blocks phaeomelanin, so it doesn't show up at all. Amber does the same, but with melanin. Aethen really wants to combine smoke with amber to see if he can get a morph that's close to white. I thought that was silly because I already have Phyrdnes and she's all white, but then he pointed out that she's ALL white. Like the pattern doesn't show up at all either. Then he said that this means that her morph, snow, probably acts over other recessive morphs so even if I tried to pair a ribbon with a snow, the ribbon wouldn't show up!

Oh! Also! He explained dominants and recessives to me and I had it all wrong. I thought that wild type was dominant over ALL other morphs, but that doesn't make sense because then all babies would come out as wild type! What dominant actually means is that it only takes one of those genes for the type to activate, so if there's no homozygous (he taught me that word) pairs, but there is a wild marker, then it comes out as wild colour! I was getting all confused because there was a clutch with two ribbon parents so I thought all the babies would come out as ribbons, but they didn't! There were wild types! So then Aethen explained type dominance to me and he even drew me notes!

The plus marks mean wild dominance. So because both parents were parchment morphs, a lot of the babies came out as parchment, but not all of them! Some only got one parchment allele, so they ended up being wild type.

And both of the parents also carried a recessive sand allele, even though neither showed it, so there ended up being some sand babies too.

And then he explained that sometimes recessive markers share the same allele, so even if they get enough markers from both parents, only one morph will show up! He said that smoke and dusty probably shared an allele since one reduces phaeomelanin and the other blocks it. So instead of pairing Zaphe and Dratah, I paired Zehli with his Sedge so we could test it out.

And he was right! We should have had dusty/smokes, but there weren't any, which means they share an allele. I don't really understand why this is important, but he was real excited.

Oh, I also got a bunch of new babies, including another snow!

AND NOW THERE'S PURPLE. Me and Aethen were both really excited about this one. We both ended up with suntan/wisteria (that's the name of the purple morph) babies and he called the morph stormfront.

I've got a bunch of things I want to do next. Aethen says it's theoretically possible to make a BLUE morph, so I want to try for that. Also, I want to help him make a non-snow white morph so I can get white babies with spots or stripes. Plus I also want to see if I can make a super dark suntan morph. Like all black. Right now, I think I'm going to try for the smoke/amber morph. Also, I got to ask Shifari if Ytise has any more hidden morphs. I keep forgetting.

Okay, that's it.

Serzi