Golden colour dominant?

[Tess]

Hello,

I have a question. As some of you will know, I live in Belgium. Here, you can buy in almost any aqua shop Brigs apple snails. But however, the only colour you find is golden... I have been in 8 different shops now, they all had the golden onces, but no other colour.
Why is this? Is gold dominant in breeding? Are the other colours hard to breed?

I do have some other colours tough (blue, purple,ivory) but I had to order them by mail.

I'm very curious about this.

[pbgroupie]

Not easier to breed, but the other colors are more common in the US and it has taken awhile for them to get to other places around the globe. There have been many members here who have bred their snails to produce a larger number of certain colors that were harder to find in the pet store trade. I remember when one purple snail (dark or light, it didn't matter) would go for $10-15 each in USD. Now you can get one for $3-5 from most breeders because they are not as rare.

[Tess]

Okay, thanks!

And is it true that the golden colour is dominant over other colours? I heard that on some other dutch forum but I doubt their expertise a little...

[pbgroupie]

It depends on a lot of factors, mainly what colors the snail's parents and grandparents were. If we consider the "wild" colored snail the most dominant trait (all other colors supposedly came from wild-colored snails) then it would depend on how many generations of select breeding were done to breed out the possibility of the wild color showing up again. If gold snails are all that are available to breed, then the probability of only gold offspring is high. Does that make sense?

[Pollux]

i have the same problem here in australia.

[RandySr1]

This is a great program to find colors for breeders that I found here on this forum somewhere.

http://engr.smu.edu/~dquick/

randy-