The scenario you describe is much more common than you think. I know for a fact that batches of auratus have come in and the folks in the US receiving them have divied them up according to morphology. Their thinking is that the frogs were probably collected from a number of different wild locations and mixed together so they try to split them back out to what was "natural". I think they are kidding themselves personally and there is no way to know for sure. You can drive yourself crazy playing these games. I think the best bet is to maintain groups using the "best available information". If a shipment comes in with a mix of variable frogs, I don't think we can assume that these frogs are from multiple wild populations. And even if we knew for certain that they were, we could not assume we could split them back out correctly. As for the scenario of collecting the "pretty ones" from the wild. Hesselhause described exactly that scenario in his book. Who the heck would collect the "ugly" ones? So at some point we need to get comfortable with the fact that some/many captive populations are simply not representative of wild populations but that is okay. They still look and act like wild frogs to us and there are probably still wild frogs that look and act like them. What more do we want? In other words, we could start doing a lot better about managing captive populations but we probably shouldn't get too carried away trying to force the ambiguous captives back into perfect bins.
Genetic testing could be used to determine population status in theory but the logistics of doing it make it impractical.
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Brent
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