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SnailsUnderstanding Mystery Snail Colors (+ Color Chart!)
Thinking of adding a few mystery snails (Pomacea diffusa, also sometimes called Pomacea bridgesii) to your aquarium? Good choice! These snails make for surprisingly fun pets. They're active and will help rid your tank of leftover bits of food and other debris. And did you know they come in loads of different colors?
Below, we'll have a look at the 8 different mystery snail color morphs to help you pick your favorite(s). After that, we'll take a deep dive into mystery snail color genetics. It's a little complicated, but it's extremely helpful if you'd like to breed your snails (which is easy and fun!).
Let's get started!
Table of Contents
Mystery snail colors: the 8 color morphs
Although no specimen is the same, and we could technically probably name more different mystery snail color morphs, the generally accepted number is eight different morphs. They vary in terms of shell color, the presence or absence of stripes, and body color.
The list of mystery snail colors is as follows (names may vary slightly, as they're by no means official):
The most common in the aquarium hobby is probably the gold mystery snail. This is not the original, however: wild-type snails are brown with stripes. The most highly sought-after is the magenta variety.
Did you know? The Shrimp Farm ♥ mystery snails! They make great shrimp tankmates. We carry mystery snails in a whopping 7 different colors.
Mystery snail genetics for breeders
Looking to breed mystery snails with specific colors? To understand mystery snail coloration, and to figure out what you can expect when pairing up two differently-colored snails, you'll have to know a little about genetics.
Warning: It gets a little funky here and can seem complicated. This section is mostly for breeders, you don't need to read it if you just wanted to know what mystery snail colors exist.
Let's dive in!
What you need to know about genes
As you're probably aware, most organisms have two sets of chromosomes, which contain their entire set of genes. One is inherited from dad, and one from mom. Some of an organism's appearance, notably its color, may be determined genetically.
The two copies of each gene that an organism contains are called alleles. What's important to know for mystery snail colors is that a creature can be homozygous for a gene (meaning it has two of the same alleles for that gene, ie. two alleles for stripes on the shell), or it can be heterozygous (meaning it has two different alleles, ie. one for stripes and one for no stripes).
Whether our theoretical snail will display stripes or not depends on whether the alleles are dominant or recessive. If an allele is dominant, an organism only needs one of it for it to be displayed (ie., if the allele for stripes is dominant, then the mystery snail will be striped even if only one of its parents passed on a copy of it).
If an allele is recessive, an organism needs two for it to be displayed (ie. if the stripe allele is recessive, the mystery snail needs to receive copies of it from both parents in order for it to be striped).
In real mystery snail genetics, the allele for stripes is dominant.
Example: Creating a striped snail
In the study of genetics, genes and alleles are usually referred to using letter combinations for clarity. Taking the mystery snail as the example, we know that there's a gene for stripes on the shell. Let's call it B:
- B = stripes (dominant allele)
- b = no stripes (recessive allele)
When breeding our snails, we might see the following combinations:
- BB (Homozygous dominant): The snail has two dominant alleles and will have a striped shell.
- Bb (Heterozygous): The snail has one dominant allele (B) and one recessive allele (b), but it will still have a striped shell because the dominant allele masks the recessive one.
- bb (Homozygous recessive): The snail has two recessive alleles and will have a non-striped shell, since there's no dominant allele to mask the recessive trait.
To clarify this, let's single out one mystery snail and call him Steve. Steve is bb, meaning he has a plain, non-striped shell. That doesn't, however, necessarily mean that his parents weren't striped themselves!
Steve's parentage may have consisted of the following combinations:
- Both parents are bb (non-striped): If both parents are homozygous recessive (bb), they can only pass on the recessive allele to their offspring. In this scenario, Steve and all of his siblings would be non-striped.
- One parent is bb (non-striped) and the other is Bb (striped, but carrying non-striped): The parent with the Bb genotype can pass on either the dominant allele (B) or the recessive allele (b), while the bb parent can only pass on the recessive allele (b). Therefore, there's a 50% chance for each offspring to be bb (receiving the recessive allele from both parents). Half of Steve's siblings are likely to be striped.
- Both parents are Bb (heterozygous): Each parent can pass on either the dominant allele (B) or the recessive allele (b). The possible offspring genotypes from this pairing are BB, Bb, or bb. There's a 25% chance for offspring to be bb, receiving the recessive allele from both parents. Three-quarters of Steve's siblings are likely to be striped.
We can visualize this using a chart. Here is a representation of example 3:
What’s known about mystery snail genetics
If you've followed along this far, you'll understand that as long as we know whether an allele for a certain physical trait in mystery snails is dominant or recessive, we can predict what kind of babies a pair of snails will produce.
In cases where we're aware of the pair's parentage, it's easy, as we'll know whether they're homozygous or heterozygous. If we're not, we can let them have some babies and check what the offspring looks like, which will help us figure it out.
For example, looking at Steve and his siblings above, it's pretty easy to tell that the allele for stripes is dominant and his parents are heterozygous, otherwise the distribution in striped and non-striped shells would be different (see the other two scenarios outlined above the chart).
Now what if I told you that we're reasonably sure that mystery snail appearance is determined by three genes?
- Striped or non-striped: as we know, the gene for stripes is dominant. Let's continue calling it B.
- Light or dark body: the gene for a dark body is dominant. Let's call it C.
- Color or no color: the gene for the deposition of color on the shell is dominant. Let's call it D.
We can look at the different mystery snail colors and figure out what genetic combo they carry. The most poignant example is the ivory mystery snail: it carries none of the dominant genes above. No stripes, light body, and no color. They're all recessive: bb+cc+dd.
What about the blue snail? It has no stripes (bb), a dark body (CC or Cc), and no shell color (dd). Its combo would be written as bb+C_+dd. The underscore allows for the possibility of both CC and Cc, because as we know, it doesn't matter if it also carries the recessive gene; the dark body is dominant.
Now, if you mix two snails together, it's obvious that depending on the allele combinations the parents carry for each of the three genes, you can get a pretty wide range of colors and patterns on the babies. That's what makes breeding them so much fun!
This especially applies because when it comes to stripes and colors, things don't appear to be as simple as "on/off" for an allele. For the shell, for example, it appears it can be "on: yellow", "on: green", and "on: purple".
Conclusion
Not all of this is fully understood yet, but with the information outlined here, you should have some control over your snails' output in terms of appearance. You can try consulting a full genetics chart, which are reasonably accurate nowadays. And don't forget to write down your results so you can more accurately predict the outcome of each egg clutch in the future!
What's your favorite mystery snail color? Have we missed any (selective breeding is always resulting in new varieties!)? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below!
