On November 11, 2000, the offspring were separated from their mother. At no time were the babies exposed to their father; often, the male will eat the babies if he is provided the chance. On December 2, 2000, the males were separated from the females. At six weeks of age, hamsters are old enough to mate and successfully reproduce. Because we were only looking to reproduce certain traits, we separated the males from females and only placed certain hamsters together to produce desired traits.
Throughout the months of January and February, we placed the F1 generation unbanded, umbrous, short hair female hamster in the F1 generation banded, umbrous, short hair male's cage for four consecutive days. However, the female continuously attacked the male. For fear that she would seriously harm him, we discontinued our attempts at breeding them. Perhaps the female was not in estrus; often during the winter months, a female will not enter estrus and thus not mate with a male.
If we had been successful at breeding the banded, umbrous, short hair male with the unbanded, umbrous, short hair female, who both show phenotypes for recessive traits (i.e. banded pattern, umbrous coloring), offspring who look very similar to the P generation male and F1 male and female would have been produced. The cross is as follows:
| BabaLlee x babaLlee | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BaLe | baLe | Bale | bale | ||
| baLe | BabaLLee | babaLLee | BabaLlee | babaLlee | |
| bale | BabaLlee | babaLlee | Baballee | baballee | |
The cross of the F1 generation would have resulted in the following F2 generation genotypes:
The phenotypes are as follows:
Some of the offspring would be banded because the F1 generation male is banded and the F1 generation female carries the gene. However, she is unbanded. All of the offspring would display umbrous coloring because the F1 generation male and female are homozygous for the umbrous gene which is simple recessive. Two of the offspring would have long hair because both the F1 generation male and female carry genes for long hair although they both exhibit short hair. Long hair, a simple recessive trait, was first shown in the P generation male and then passed on to his offspring, who passed the trait to the F2 generation.
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