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Breeding offspring back to their parents
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by pygmybait on August 25, 2004
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I was just reading some stuff on a website of one of the more popular breeders out there that he has a male that will reach breeding age this year.
Here's what caught my attention - in order to achieve a certain coloration, this breeder intends to breed this snake with its mother.
I'm no expert but it seems to me that this could cause some serious problems in the offspring. Is this possible without creating a bunch of "challenged" animals?
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by Scootertrash on August 25, 2004
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We have a "challenged" dog that is a product of incest but I'm not sure if the same thing happens to reptiles. Good question though.
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RE: Breeding offspring back to their parents
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by pygmybait on August 25, 2004
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The thing is, I live in the south and have seen first hand what incest can reap. I'm not joking here either. It does happen. Pointy ears and all.... Take a look at the Egyptian royal families. Incest was very common practice then and if you look at the paintings of the royals, they all had pointy heads and funny shaped bodies (everyone else depicted in the paintings appears to be normal). I'd hate to think that people were breeding snakes with sub-standard abilities just because they are prettier. I see it with many "pure" bred dogs as well. Sure they are pretty but you show me an Irish Setter that has any sense - I swear - you could lead one off of the front porch and it would be lost. Why? They're all inbred. I'm trying very hard to keep this PC but it's so hard!
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RE: Breeding offspring back to their parents
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by Joy on August 25, 2004
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From my understanding, reptiles are much sturdier genetically than mammals. Occasional inbreeding doesn’t affect them the way it would affect us (LOL). That is the way many of the color and pattern morphs popular in snakes today have been created. Sure, you occasionally get the two headed snake, but not too often! And this happens in the wild (both inbreeding and two headed snakes). Think about it, some snake populations are isolated and the only way they could ever find a mate is at the family reunion.
Ye Haw!
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RE: Breeding offspring back to their parents
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by Scootertrash on August 25, 2004
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Good one Joy. I have one very smart Pit Bull that I can only assume has a clean bloodline but on the other hand I also have a very dumb one that i know came from a breeder that was trying to breed for colors and ended up breeding mother and son to get those colors. I know this doesn't really pertain to reptiles but I too grew up in the south and have seen first hand what incest can do.
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RE: Breeding offspring back to their parents
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by Chance on August 25, 2004
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There are a lot of people that have a lot of misconceptions about "inbreeding," or line breeding as it is most commonly used in the breeders world. It takes many many generations of very closely inbred individuals (mother to son, then grandson back to mother, etc etc etc) to really cause any bad problems. Of course there are many pure bred dogs (which are ALL inbred to some degree, no matter how smart you think your dog is), and some of these do display negative side effects but mostly that's from years and years and years of line breeding. Doing it a few times with your herps really doesn't do much harm. In fact, with most color mutations, especially those that are simple recessive (such as albinism and leucism) a certain amount of line breeding is required in order to produce the first clutch of homozygous recessive animals in any decent time frame.
Lots of people have major misconceptions about how simple our genetic makeup is (and by "our" I'm referring to every higher level organism on the planet). Let's just take a look at the very basic building blocks of our bodies, proteins. Proteins are made up of amino acids. There are small proteins and there are large proteins. "Small" proteins contain no less than 100 and no more than 500 amino acids. "Large" proteins contain 500 or more amino acids (sometimes thousands), all in a big long chain. Take a very small protein, composed of 100 amino acids. This could form any of 20^100 amino acid sequences (^ represents an exponent). That's the same as 10 followed by 130 zeros, which is more than the number of atoms known in the universe!! So what's all the gibberish mean? It basically means that there are TONS and TONS and TONS of different combinations just for ONE protein sequence, now think of how many bazillion genes we and other species incorporate. It takes many generations of line breeding (and by many I mean A LOT) to isolate the genetic sequences down enough that any real problems would begin to develop.
So anyway, that's a ton longer than I meant for it to be, but I hope you get the point. Don't worry about people breeding mother to son or father to daughter with their herps a few times, I promise it's not going to hurt their genetic makeup. I find it amusing that some people can be so opposed to inbreeding, but take a look at their herp collections and find morph this and morph that. It's just a common ignorance because peope don't take the time to look into these things.
-Chance
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by Phobos on August 25, 2004
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Well I guess I'll weigh in on this one.
I don't think this is healthy for the gene pool of any animal, period. To breed for these "recessive traits" is counter productive; Instead of breeding a "Better Reptile" you are breeding defective ones. Most of these are lethal mutations in a wild population, that's why they are not found in the wild in numbers.
By the way Chance please rethink your genetic model stated in this thread. Not trying to have a pissing match about it but DNA is the genetic code of a species or individual, not proteins. There is 20 amino acids but only 4 Nucleotides that make up DNA. Structurally, DNA is a double helix: two strands of genetic material spiraled around each other. Each strand contains a sequence of bases (also called nucleotides). A base is one of four chemicals (adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine).
The two strands of DNA are connected at each base. Each base will only bond with one other base, as follows: Adenine (A) will only bond with thymine (T), and guanine (G) will only bond with cytosine (C). Suppose one strand of DNA looks like this:
A-A-C-T-G-A-T-A-G-G-T-C-T-A-G
It is the DNA sequence which codes the amino acids which form the proteins. Also there is also only one amino acid sequence for each protein, Not TONS.
Best,
Al
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RE: Breeding offspring back to their parents
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by Chance on August 25, 2004
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My point was really that to worry about some breeders trying to propogate certain morphs or color characteristics is really pointless. But you are right. I looked over that rather miniscule (lol, not really though) aspect about the four bases of DNA in my original post. However, there are still many different sequence combinations possible.
It really is not our job as breeders to try to genetically strengthen an animal's lineage. Maybe if we breed highly endangered species, that would be a good goal. However, if we breed highly endagered species, we'll probably only have access to a very small number of animals anyway, so we would have to resort to line breeding. For things like corn snakes, ball pythons, reticulated pythons, burmese pythons, etc, these animals are doing a great job in the wild of keeping their species strong (granted some are on the decline). The ones we keep in captivity will never be wild again (in theory, non-applicable to FL), so worrying about having to resort to line breeding to produce albino this or leucistic that is really pointless. Enough genetic variation is going to be present, even after quite a few generations of line breeding, that there is very little possibility for something bad to pop up. Besides, when people breed albinos and other morphs, they are almost always spread out to other lineages once the gene is stabilized, thus further increasing variation.
I wasn't trying to say that inbreeding isn't bad, period. I was just trying to say that too many people don't understand the variability aspect and immediately jump on line breeding as being bad. In instances where it is done over and over and over, never trying to incorporate new bloodlines, yes bad things will occur. But for a few times, it is essentially harmless.
-Chance
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by Phobos on August 26, 2004
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Hey Chance:
Yes, I agree there are a huge possible combinations and a few breeder combining related specimens is a "genetic drop in the bucket" I do still disagree that in the big scheme of things that unless a breeder is really careful a real mess can be made. The dog breeds are a very good example of "Making a better Dog" gone bad.
See ya,
Al
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