Re: bloodline crossing
This is a good topic, and i've spent a lot of time thinking about it myself.
Without locale data there isn't really a right or wrong answer. We don't know what population of ebenaui/betsileo your male was collected from, and we don't know where Mark's came from either. The two species can not be told apart based on morphology alone, you need to know where they were collected or do some molecular/genetic stuff to tell the two species apart at this time. So in this situation, if it were me, I would keep the two seperate.
I keep different imports of the same species apart myself, but this doesn't really ensure anything considering it's possible (likely?) that the exporters are obtaining mantella frogs from multiple populations.
I guess you have to ask yourself what the goal is too. What's the purpose of breeding your frogs? Why bother with this attempt to keep populations seperate if offspring are just entering the pet trade anyways? Is that the objective, to produce frogs for the trade (theoretically reducing demand for wild-caught frogs, realistically it's a different story)? or is there something larger in your mind, maintaining a viable captive population that represents one in the wild? Once you establish this, it's easier to figure out if it's best to keep two groups of frogs seperate or not.
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