Soft Scale Crested Geckos

The crested gecko has a structural trait called Soft Scale. This trait changes the skin rather than the pattern. Because there are fewer bumps between the scales, the animal feels softer in the hand and the colour looks cleaner and brighter than the same base on a normal. Two copies are obvious while one copy is subtle. It is worth knowing this before you pay for the label.

Appearance

Soft Scale geckos have cleaner, enhanced colour and fewer scales with more space between each one than a normal crested gecko. You often see a steely grey eye with a dark grey or black ring around the edge of the eyeball. The tail and belly are unaffected. It takes a keeper who has handled a lot of crested geckos to see or feel the difference on a single-copy animal because it is subtle.

You can spot the extreme form, Super Soft Scale, at a glance. The soft texture is far more obvious than on a single-copy animal, and the scales look smaller and sit visibly apart. Because a single copy is easy to confuse with a smooth, clean normal, the most reliable proof of a Soft Scale is what it produces, not how it looks.

Genetics

Soft Scale is incomplete dominant, which most sellers loosely list as "co-dom". The gene sits in no allelic complex. Soft Scale is the single-copy form and Super Soft Scale is the two-copy form. You confirm the gene through breeding: a Soft Scale producing Soft Scales from an unrelated mate, and a pair of those producing Super Soft Scales, proves it. It began with Anthony Caponetto (AC Reptiles) in 2004 when he bought a chocolate female from a wholesaler. He held back her offspring and later bred Soft to Soft to get the first Super Softs. Two proven lines exist. These are the AC line and the SAF line that Geckological worked from unrelated animals. Whitewall lateral markings are inherited separately. These markings first appeared in geckos from the earliest Soft Scale pairings.