Flame Crested Geckos
The Flame crested gecko has a paler stripe down its back that breaks up its solid body colour. There is little pattern on its limbs or sides. Because no two Flames have the same shade or width of stripe, you choose one for the animal in front of you instead of for a fixed look.
About the Flame gene
A pale stripe along the dorsum breaks the solid body colour of a Flame crested gecko. This pattern is one of the oldest recognised ones in the hobby. It is also the ancestor of several crested gecko lines with heavier patterns. Because a single gene does not fix the trait but selective breeding builds it up, keepers buy one based on how wide, continuous, and clean that stripe is.
Appearance
A Flame is set apart from its more heavily marked relatives by the lack of body pattern. The base colour ranges from orange, yellow, olive, red, or dark brown or black. A paler stripe in cream, white, or orange breaks this colour along the spine. This stripe is often incomplete and may break or thin instead of running solid from neck to tail. Beyond a trace of the dorsal colour, the limbs and sides have little or no pattern of their own. A Harlequin shows the same paler colour spreading onto the limbs and laterals, while an Extreme Harlequin carries it further still. Breeders judge a Flame on the whiteness, continuity, and width of its stripe. Because no two animals are bred to an identical standard, the stripe varies considerably from one Flame to the next.
Genetics
Rather than being a single dominant or recessive gene, Flame is polygenic and sits in no allelic complex. Breeders build the pattern over generations by pairing animals with the most continuous, palest, widest stripe. Offspring inherit a tendency toward it, but it is not a guaranteed outcome. You can find it listed as Flame and Pos Flame, and there is no confirmed two-copy Super Flame. Harlequin and Extreme Harlequin come from the same stock instead of a separate lineage, while Pinstripe refines the same dorsal stripe further. It is bred for its edge of raised, unbroken scales.
Flame traces to wild-collected animals that reached the US market from at least 1995, when the hobby knew the pattern as fire. This older name still turns up in write-ups from the period, and it is not the site's separate Fire trait. Fire is an incomplete dominant gene, once called Genetic Hypo, where a single copy produces a pale animal and its two-copy form is the white, near-leucistic Super Fire. A Flame carries no effects of that gene nor the gene itself.