Genetics & Lineage :: Porthole x Whiteout Laterals

Home/Genetics & Lineage/Porthole x Whiteout Laterals

Porthole x Whiteout Laterals

Text and Photos by Anthony Caponetto

Natural Porthole Laterals
What I consider natural Porthole laterals, on their own, are tiny white dots. Most are a single white scale at a time. I use the term 'natural' because they weren't something anyone really bred for, and I would guess these are seen in a number of wild crested geckos. These typically show up anywhere from 5-10 (maybe a few more) random, white scales on the sides of the gecko, usually protruding a tiny bit like a pinstripe scale. The term "portholes" was coined at some point early on - long before it had been paired with Whiteout and people started breeding for it.

Circa 2008 - Young Adult Red Dalmatian with natural Porthole laterals.

Note: This was normal crested gecko structure at the time, which was before Pinstripe (the gene responsible for dorsal crests we have today) was in most collections.

Porthole x Whiteout Laterals
Adding the Whiteout gene is where things got interesting and put the term "portholes" on the map as something people look for and want to breed for. What most people call "Portholes" in today's crested gecko hobby are actually geckos with Porthole x Whiteout laterals.

What's happening with the geckos you see here is that we've added the Whiteout gene on top of the dinky little natural Porthole lateral markings, which is the same exact gene responsible for Whitewalls in geckos with the gene or genes that cause lateral striping. Without genes for lateral striping, and two copies of the Whiteout gene (in other words, it's a homozygous or "Super Whiteout"), we end up with very large, white bubbles all over the sides. With only one copy of Whiteout, you get the same effect, but with smaller bubbles. Really cool utilization of the Whiteout gene and absolutely better than expected.

In the late 2010's, I made an effort to add some white to the sides of my black and red spotted Phantom Super Dalmatians, so I figured we'd put whitewalls on them - and we did with some of them. Others didn't show up in the form of Whitewalls, but rather large white bubbles. Breed two of those together and your bubbles start to dominate the gecko's entire appearance - which is super cool and will be very popular as more of these geckos hit the market.

Genetics
What you're looking at on this page is actually a 3+ gene copy combination. Two copies of Whiteout and at least one copy of the gene responsible for Porthole laterals.

We know from our Whitewall projects thata Whiteout is an incomplete dominant gene and the homozygous version is consistently more extreme.

Porthole laterals, which I have never worked on in a serious manner, is either a dominant or incomplete dominant gene. In other words, I've seen enough to know portholes are hereditary and that they aren't recessive, but what I'm unsure if there's a homozygous (aka "super") form of natural porthole laterals.

Again - what you're looking at on this page are homozygous for the Whiteout gene and either heterozygous or homozygous for the natural Porthole gene. Requiring 3 gene copies is what makes these desirable geckos so rare.

I won't drone on about how a two gene combo actually works or make you look at a punnet square, as I don't want that to become the focus of this page, but this combo works just like anything else. If you're familiar with how dominant and incomplete dominant genes (and their combos) work in other species, such as ball pythons and leopard geckos, this is no different.

Division into Two Projects:
Super Dalmatian & Non-Dalmatian

I am essentially in the process of dividing what started as one project into two projects with multiple bloodlines comprising each. I'm using Dalmatians to make Super Dalmatians and then separating the Non-Dalmatians for their own project. Same thing I've done with a number of other Phantom projects.

This is a combo I've been working on for two generations, using an assortment of phantoms with whitewall laterals, and my own Dalmatian projects that had the original tiny white portholes on the sides (but no Whiteout to take advantage of them). I wanted to put more white on these Super Dalmatians, so that's what I did. As with any Dalmatian x Dalmatian pairing (both being non-Supers), you get about 1/4 non-Dalmatian.

I took the Non-Dalmatian examples and ran with it, immediately breeding those into my red whitewall (non Phantom) projects as well as my Super Soft Scale pink-red Phantom projects. The focus now is to develop a number of independent lineages of red Phantoms with Porthole x Whiteout laterals that we can outcross indefinitely, without compromising their white on red appearance.

The Super Dalmatian version - the original intent of this whole project - is an incredibly wild looking Red Phantom with several types of large Dalmatian spots - regular black spots, faded "oil spots" and then red spots and then the white ones we've added by plugging Whiteout in there.