Snowflake Crested Geckos
Snowflake puts white spots on a crested gecko's legs and flanks, starting as a few flecks or none at all and spreading until the gecko is around two. A hatchling tells you little about the adult, so judge the trait on grown animals.
About the Snowflake gene
The Snowflake morph creates white spots on crested geckos. These start as nothing at all or just a few pale scales before they bloom as the animal grows. This morph is added by keepers to Lilly Whites, phantoms, tricolours, extreme harlequins, and high-white harlequins. In these cases, the spots spread out of the white pattern already there and push the animal whiter still.
Appearance
Small blobs of white pattern form the spots on the legs and laterals. These spots follow existing white like portholes or the pinstripe. Because of this, a pinstriped gecko has white running down from the pins in the look sold as drippy. A hatchling might have just a handful of white scales. The spots can grow large, but progression stops at around two years old. An adult's amount of white varies a great deal between animals. Many carry so little that the trait is easy to miss. This makes a young gecko a poor guide to the finished look. There is a ceiling for breeding for more because stacking the trait over generations raises expression only so far.
Nothing shows if there is no white pattern for the trait to work on. Snowflake is a separate trait from portholes, which also put white marks on the sides. Read the lineage as well as the spots. When paired with Lilly White, Snowflake produces the full-coverage animals that come out near or completely white, sold as Snowflake Lilly.
Genetics
The family is listed by sellers as Snowflake and Super Snowflake, while the trait is also sold as White Spot. People in the hobby tend to file it under "co-dom", but how it is inherited is not settled. Morphpedia types it incomplete dominant. The original line's genetics are called anything but predictable by Anthony Caponetto, who named it, and he found that selective breeding did little to lift it. A second variant has been spreading through the hobby since around 2012 that blooms far more heavily, with up to ten times as much white, and whether it is a separate gene or the same locus is still open. Anthony Caponetto identified the trait in his AC Reptiles collection from stock that came from Repashy, and he borrowed the name from Philippe de Vosjoli's description of a leachianus line whose white bloomed the same way.