Wild caught specimens

[Dartfrogfreak]

Alright Ive read alot of forums about mixing species & such


I understand dont do it & why.


My question how many wild caught specimens imorted actually are true species or color morphs were actually true morphs & such .l


How do we know everything is "pure"

I mean look at the whole Sipaliwini / Kutari River morph system
Dont get me wrong these are my Favorite morph along with new river tincs.

But who decided these are pure morphs. You can get yellow green &/or blue out of the same parents.,



My points how do we know that our morphs in the hobby arent results of other morhs i the wild interbreeding


Please dont take this wrong way I dont condone interbreeding.

Im just giving everyone something to think & chat about

[Ben_C]

Dartfrogfreak,
Sorry I can't be of much help, as I haven't worked with importers before and I am very uneducated on the processes involved with collection, exportation from south/central america.
I can provide a little information about your following question, though:

My points how do we know that our morphs in the hobby arent results of other morhs i the wild interbreeding

A lot of the morphs, not all by any means, are collected from reproductively isolated populations. This would make it very improbable that 2 are interbreeding over a large geographical barrier. There are morphs available whose distribution cross over eachother, however, and in one case that I've read about (D. pumilio), there seems to be some sexual selection to mate with your own 'morph.'

Someone correct me if I am wrong in the next statement, but it seems to me that people are labeling reticulated animals as different 'morphs.' I can't speak for anything other than the auratus on O'ahu, so take the following very lightly:

On O'ahu, there exist several variants of the typical 'taboga' auratus. There are, of course, the nominat auratus as well as 'reticulated', yellowish, blueish, completely black, completely brown, ones with one black strip going from head to vent, frogs with no green pigment and white in its place, as well as mixes of the above...from our preliminary data, it seems that there is no sexual selection within this population and everybody breeds with everybody.

Sorry to cut that short, but I'm starving and I gotta eat

I hope this helps,
B

[Ben_C]

P.S.
sorry to go way off topic, but it seems I'm pretty good at that hehehe
sorry again,
B

[Dartfrogfreak]

Ive often wondered about the auratus especially Blues & turquoise.



If anyone has comments on this topic please feel free to add your veiws

[KeroKero]

To be honest, we don't know, and we never will. We generally just follow the rule of morphs "breeding true" (producing animals like the parents) and if it doesn't, that throws the whole morph into suspect.

Ideally if we collected animals from the center of the geographical area of a population, that would have animals of the true morph that breed true, but this might not always happen. Animals on the borders might be from everlapping areas with other members of their species and may be intergrades. We might also be getting animals that are just starting to, evolution wise, become their own population, were there is still a lot of genetic variation. Hawaii has a massive amount of variation for a population, but is that normal for the population they came from, did they come from multiple populations and were all placed together, or was it due to a small begining population causing inbreeding and genetically some crazy stuff is popping up?

With the panama auratus we have to take into account how they were raised on the farm... were morphs mixed together, on purpose or otherwise? Is that what causes the turquoise to throw anything from green to blue? Many of the other farm raised auratus seem to be breeding true enough.

The terms species and population/morph are completely man-made and ever changing. There really aren't "true" anything, or else why would they be changing all the time?

Then we get the whole problem of animals coming in that are unknown... whether to science as a whole or just the importer. Animals come in mislabled all the time. Panguana lamasi is still called panguana imitator in europe, there is even debate on if they may actually be biolat, or another closely related species. A couple of years ago there was supposidly an export of Atelopus ignescens... at least thats what the paper work said. Too bad the last one was seen in 1989. So what was really exported?

In the hobby we take what we can get, apply what we know to what we have, and run with it.