A Brief History of the Phantom Gene
by Anthony Caponetto
I first coined the term Phantom back in the mid-2000's after accidentally discovering there was a recessive gene in my best pinstripes. At first I tried calling them Patternless Pinstripes, but all the literal types kept complaining that they're not actually patternless, so back to the drawing board on a name. Fortunately, most everyone liked the name "Phantom" and that uninteresting and thankless process was over. I've always been more into breeding them than discussing terminology online, so that was something I didn't love dealing with. lol
For the next 12-15 or so years, I focused my phantom-efforts on two groups - Dalmatians and non-Dalmatians. I didn't put much effort into introducing other pattern genes/traits because early efforts demonstrated that Phantom pretty much eats every pattern trait you throw at it. Because I didn't expect we'd see a lot of success, due to Phantom's tendency to reduce the white markings, or so I thought, I didn't recognize the potential this gene held.
Over time, thanks to my habit of constant outcrossing and the Phantom gene making its way into other projects - and the happy accident of unwittingly breeding the Empty Back gene into my Phantoms, I started to learn that Phantom doesn't always suppress white markings. Things like Whiteout or Lilly White and even white "highlighted" pinning are possible if you have the right genes present.
Once I had eventually learned that Phantom could be a great canvas for making combos, the wheels started turning and I started doing some pairings to see what I could do with them. At some point in 2019 (I remember because it was the season leading into the pandemic), I had decided to build what I referred to as a "parallel collection" of Phantoms. The idea was to build a Phantom version of my entire collection, including every project I have, using all of the same genes. It has taken 5 years and about 3 generations (give or take a generation) in most of these projects, but that parallel Phantom collection is now a reality and makes up a substantial portion of my collection. Not only is it working out as I thought it would, the combos are quite a bit better than I had in mind back in 2019.
I'm beyond excited to finally start offering these Phantom combos to our customers and to see what the future holds!
Phantom Combo Photos
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