Citrus Bearded Dragons for sale in the UK

Citrus is the hobby's name for a yellow to orange colour line in the central bearded dragon. No mutation sits behind it, so there is no citrus gene to test for and no het citrus. The yellow comes from many genes working together and from generations of a breeder keeping back the brightest animals. Keepers pay a premium for the word, and that is why the word on its own is worth so little: it gets used for any yellow dragon, line or no line.

Appearance

Colour runs from pale lemon and lime wash through strong yellow to warm tangerine, depending on the line. What marks a carefully selected animal is consistency: colour from nose to tail tip rather than a bright head on an otherwise standard body, with little dull brown barring left. Yellow usually deepens as the animal matures, so a pale hatchling out of deep tangerine adults has colour still to come, and a bright hatchling out of mild parents may have spent most of its potential already. Ask for adult photographs of the parents and of siblings from recent clutches.

Colour also moves day to day. A bearded dragon lightens its back towards yellow when warm and darkens it towards brown when cool, while the beard and chest darken during social display and ignore temperature, and a shed cycle puts a grey cast over everything. Citrus on its own changes nothing structural: not the scales, the eyes or the claws.

Genetics

Citrus is polygenic and line bred, so nothing about a clutch follows from the label, and pairing two bright animals gives a spread of colour across the clutch. The catalogue carries a single Citrus row with no het or super beside it, unlike Hypo, Translucent, Witblits and Zero, which are the rows with real inheritance.

Where Citrus ends and Yellow, Lemon, Gold, Sandfire or Tangerine begins is down to breeder usage. Morphpedia files the trait as Yellow/citrus and lists Sandfire, lemon and gold as its proven lines, with citrus leaning yellow and sandfire leaning red-orange. Citrus sits on top of everything structural, which is why you read it next to hypo, translucent, leatherback and dunner rather than instead of them, and why Hypo Citrus and Citrus Leatherback read brightest: each strips something that was muting the colour. Read a long name from the outside in and check each claim separately: clear claws for hypo, a blue juvenile belly for translucent, reduced spikes for leatherback.