Should albinos, hybrids, etc. be discouraged?

Tad wrote: I do think it would be a shame to see the "natural looking" specimens disappear from the hobby, I dont think will ever happen to many people feel the same way. However I think its hypocritical to be upset at someone who owns/breeds hybrids b/c its "not natural" if thats how you feel, you shouldnt be keeping the animals unless its part of your work as a conservationist or for a natural history museum because keeping them as pets is not "natural".


Tad, you and I have been through this before. The loss of "natural looking" animals is exactly what will happen if selective breeding runs rampant BEFORE a registry and guidelines are in place. Several decades ago you could buy a wild type cornsnake for $10-$30. Then the first albinos appeared and were fetching something around $200. Within a few generations albinos were common enough that the price was coming down and heterzygotes were dispersed throughout the hobby to the point that if you had a "wild type" animal, there was a good bet that it was heterozygous dominant for albinism. This was followed by melanistic, amelanistic, anaeurythristic, etc. until virtually every cb cornsnake in the hobby was the product of selective breeding of one or more "rare" alleles. Wild types virtually dissapeared as cb specimens. Why did this happen? Because recessive traits are masked by dominant ones so heterozygous animals cannot be distinguished by appearance. I've heard people say as long as the animals are honestly represented, there is no problem. That's true except that it doesn't work. How much do any of us really know about the origin of our own animals? Think about it. Now consider that just because you honestly represent frogs sold to someone, that doesn't mean that the next person, or the person after that will do the same. In the early days of the cornsnake fiasco people did honestly represent animals as hets for "blank" or what have you. But as the hets began to outnumber the true wild type animals it became more difficult to keep track of who was who. Genetics gets pretty complicated beyond a simple homozygous cross so things get confusing and animals get mixed up. Add to that the fact that many breeders have no background in genetics and it is easy to see how plain jane cb cornsnakes went the way of the dodo. Personally I'm pleased to be in a hobby with a mainstream core that is devoted to not repeating mistakes of the past.

Someone asked what was wrong with the dog breeding hobby. Was that a joke? Now many dogs make fine animals but let's get real and admit that they've created a number of breeds so full of congenital defects that they practically have to be hooked up to an I.V. and oxygen from the day they are born just to make them live long enough to reproduce. Even many good breeds have been all but ruined by a hobby that breeds almost entirely based on appearance which has led to snippy and neurotic animals. The AKC is not a good model to follow for breeding quality animals IMO.

And whoever said the killifish people have done it right, you are absolutely correct. They have both guidelines AND a registry and that is exactly what we need to do.

Well, this is indeeded a very hot topic so , I decided to through my 2 cents in and see what people have to say. Lets take Dendrobates Auratus and use as our choice to talk about. There are quit a few different color morphs of this speciecs in this hobby. Would you take a Blue and Black male or female and put in a tank with a Green and Blackor even a Brown and Gold. If you dont, then you one can argue the fact that you are indeed selectively breeding a certain trait. It has never been determined if the various color forms are genetically distinct, and until some one does prove that they are genetically distanct or disproves it you are in fact selectively breeding the Dendrobates Auratus, and every other PDF that is in the hobby with differnt color morphs. Now can you tell me why we shouldnt breed the Blue and Black with the Green and Black or any other color morph from their region? Or should we just breed the same color to the same color.

Mike P.

Should one breed/introduce runts to their frog breeding programs to give a more natural outcome???

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No. Runts and deformed froglets rarely survive in the wild. Obviously captive husbandry eliminates a lot of natural selection so obviously unfit animals should be culled.

As for hand selecting breeders, you're right, it's a form of narrowing the gene pool. It would just be stupid to pay money for frogs that look like they're on the verge of death. Also, if you are unsure of the geographic wild origin of a frog you want to breed, sometimes the only information you have to base a decision for choosing a mate is appearance. It does make sense that frogs that look alike are more likely to come from an interbreeding population than frogs that look different. However, when you get to the point of only choosing frogs that have a mickey mouse shape on their butts because you like that pattern, you have crossed the line into selective breeding. This is a fuzzy line mind you.

What I'm really suggesting is that we selectively breed frogs true to the wild populations the originated from but no further. Like others have said, various morphs of many species tend to show up predictably in certain locales. Auratus on Barro Colorado Island and distinctive from Toboga and those on the Carribean side of Costa Rica look different from the Pacific side. These types of distinctions should be maintained in captivity but we shouldn't invent distinctions like what I believe has happened in P. bicolor. I've had people ask if I have the "blue-legged" morph which as far as I can tell is a completely invented morph since I have a black-legged, bluish-legged, and yellow-green legged all from the same clutch. Pumilio were also mentioned and I just got off the phone with someone discussing the Bastimento pumilio. Justin has a photo of 4 or 5 Bastis all collected from the same tree and their colors range from red through yellow running the range of what is found in the hobby. Summers has demonstrated visual mate selection in these frogs where like frogs tend to breed with like frogs. Of course this isn't absolute which must account for the gradation of variability on the island. In captivity we tend to pair yellow with yellow, orange with orange, and so on. I contend that it would be perfectly legitimate to mix these morphs to allow the full range of variability to be expressed.

It's these types of debates that help maintain wild type frogs in the hobby and help us walk the line between producing mutts or clones. Wild types lie somewhere in between.

Good topic and intelligent discussion

I agree 100% with Brent, and some others. May I suggest that upon forming an American Dendrobated Club, it probably would be in the hobbys best interest to have hobbyists, not people involved in breeding or selling dendrobated related stuff to organize the laws and guidelines and then invite the vendors to join later. As a vendor I would concerned with another vendors input. That is not to say that their contribution would not be helpful, I just think it would avoid "questions." This organization should be founded on the animal's best interests. And I believe that conflicts regarding motives will arise. The idea is a good one. It would be difficult to organize, but I think It can be done. And I would be happy to nominate Brent as a key player in the formation of this club. Not that we have to do this today or next week. But as an outsider looking in, there are many hobbyists and academics who are not vendors who make great contributions to the hobby, and I would like to see those people involved.

My other concern is with locality frogs. I have some costa rican auratus. At NWFF Matt Mirabello had some panama auratus. I was very tempted (they are gorgeous) but refrained as I was reluctant to breed panama with costa rican. What would you call that froglet? And people do sell auratus based on locality i.e. Hawaiian auratus. It begs the question about genetic variety. So would this be a good thing? Or a bad thing? The idea didn't sit well with me. But goodness, how many kinds of tinctorious popluations are out there?

My two cents,
Good topic, intelligent discussion.
Dave

There have been a small group of froggers who have hammered out a lot of the details on a registry over the past couple of years. Some code has actually been programed. Non-profit org or not, this effort will rely on volunteer effort and therefore goes in fits and starts according to people's schedules. The group that has been working on this is purposely small. This isn't to be exclusive or elitist but we found that having open discussions on frognet was not efficient because the same arguments kept circling around.

As for guidelines, Chuck Powell posted the following citation produced by the Aquatic Conservation Network. I've tried to find a copy of this publication without any luck:

Huntley, Robert V., and Langton, Roger W., eds., 1994, Captive
Breeding Guidelines: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Aquatic Conservation
Network, 61 p. ISBN 1-895655-02-1. Copies can be ordered for $12
from Aquatic Conservation Network, 540 Roosevelt Ave., Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada K2A 1Z8. Tel.: 613-729-4670.

I think this would be a good place for froggers to start in developing guidelines. My personal suggestion is that any group working on guidelines should include at least two people well versed in genetics and population biology and it would be good to have someone knowledgeable about conservation biology as well.

TimStout wrote: Brent,
Is there enough known about the locations (size, seperation, crossover etc.) of these populations of auratus to make a determination or do we rely on the collectors/farmers word of original collection/population site.


I think we have a lot more information than we realize. Many serious froggers have traveled to the tropics and documented morphs of frogs they have encountered at various locations. At one of the late night IAD discussions Chuck N. gave a beautiful travelogue of the auratus morphs encountered as one moves from north to south. Pumilio and auratus seem particularly well documented. Of course you can't always look at one of these frogs and know for certain where it came from and there is no substitute for actual collection data if frogs are to be bred for conservation purposes, but there is a fair amount of information to let us make educated guesses about who should breed with who. I think shipment information can be really useful as well but, as you say, there is no way of knowing whether a collector or farmer has collected their animals from the same locale or kept animals separated by locality. Exactly what constitutes a "locality" is not always clear either. We also don't have great information (other than island populations) about where genetic bottlenecks might occur leading to separations of populations. I think widespread morphs like blue jeans pumilio are a particular problem. Are they widespread because because they have one large interbreeding population, or are there many subpopulations that just happen to exhibit a similar morph.

It's interesting that Dave mentioned Matt's Panamanian auratus because Matt and I talked about them quite a bit. I have "Costa Rican" auratus and I could see absolutely no difference in size, color, or pattern between the two. These fit with photos I've seen of the Carribean versant of Costa Rican auratus. It's possible that Panama and Costa Rica share the same large wild population. However, I have no supporting evidence that my frogs actually derived from Costa Rican stock other than that's what they were sold as and the fact that they match the morph of frogs found there. If I recall correctly, Matt's Panamanian have a similar background. Given these hazy backgrounds, I probably wouldn't get in a huge twist over interbreeding them. However, if one of the groups of frogs had information that would tend to link them with a particular country, then I would probably keep them apart. Because of these gradations in evidence supporting a frog's origin and different burdens of proof needed to use frogs for various reasons, I proposed a few years ago that guidelines support several grades of frog (e.g. scientific grade, hobbyist grade, general grade). I think somewhere in the frognet archives is even a list of lines of evidence that I felt would be needed to support each grade. Of course it fell flat on its face like most of my ideas.

May I suggest that upon forming an American Dendrobated Club, it probably would be in the hobbys best interest to have hobbyists, not people involved in breeding or selling dendrobated related stuff to organize the laws and guidelines and then invite the vendors to join later.

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Yes you may...and I think that's a GREAT suggestion, Dave.

Because of these gradations in evidence supporting a frog's origin and different burdens of proof needed to use frogs for various reasons, I proposed a few years ago that guidelines support several grades of frog (e.g. scientific grade, hobbyist grade, general grade). I think somewhere in the frognet archives is even a list of lines of evidence that I felt would be needed to support each grade.

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I remember in one of the last discussions on Frognet (where Chuck sited that aquatic conservation resource) that Justin Yeager voiced some concern on the difficulty of concretely placing frogs into groups based on 'quality.' I think I remember him saying that he can walk around at the beginning of each show and see frogs that he wouldn't touch with a 10 ft. pole, while others that are spectacular. I think the crux of his point was whether or not you let those with 'inferior' frogs sell their animals, or do you ban them from the show because they haven't bred up to par? Maybe he can chime in on this if I'm completely off.

However, Brent, with your comment I quoted above, that might help to aleviate some of this problem. But then again, it could be pretty difficult to make clear deliniations and distinctions between a hobbyist grade and general grade frog. And then do we end up with an Dendro AKC on our hands, and we end up striving for physical perfection rather than natural authenticity?

Just a few thoughts.

skylsdale said:

I remember in one of the last discussions on Frognet (where Chuck sited that aquatic conservation resource) that Justin Yeager voiced some concern on the difficulty of concretely placing frogs into groups based on 'quality.'

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Tad has the right idea. We are talking about two different types of "quality". There is the grading we all do when deciding whether to buy a frog and noting that some frogs would be better off as fish bait. That's not something I would be interested in getting into in an organized way and would lead to AKC style testicle squeezing shows.

What I'm talking about is grades based on the reliability of locality or population data that are available. A scientific grade frog would require the most rigorous data. Basically nothing short of actual locality data would do and supporting information about population genetics would be helpful. These would be the frogs that could be used for conservation breeding programs or for scientific research to infer knowledge about wild populations. Frankly, such breeding programs would be above the abilies or desires of most of us but it is an important group to identify where they exist so we can hold breeding guidelines to the highest standard with an eye toward working with professional institutions.

The next grade could use a combination of information sources to infer population status. The auratus and pumilio guides on websites are quite good and are really a formalized version of the travelogues I mentioned before. It allows you to match up frogs based on appearance to rough population groups like Bastimentos, Bri bri, or Toboga Island for auratus. There is also importation/shipment information that can provide clues on a frogs origins. It is also reasonable that frogs from the same shipment are more likely to come from the same population than frogs that were from different shipments (one from Panama and one from Nicaragua for example). Of course being from the same shipment doesn't guarantee they are from the same population but it's a clue that can help seggregate frogs at least enough to maintain some natural variability and still retain geographic uniqueness (a.k.a. wild type). Finally there is the frogs captive lineage. There are lines of frogs whose wild origins can't even be pinned down to a country but their lineage in captivity documented enough that we are pretty confident they represent "some wild population" even if we don't know the location of that population. The French Guiana vents might be a good example since I've heard speculation that these didn't come from Guiana at all yet, there are a few lines that have been bred true through the years. We might not know where they come from but it's a good bet there are little frogs somewhere in the tropics that look and act like these little buggers.

Finally there is the general grade that we really don't know much about at all. They could be species hybrids, morph hybrids, or just frogs whose lineage is a complete mystery. They still might be nice little frogs that provide a lot of enjoyment but they wouldn't be suitable breeding stock for maintaining wild type lines.

Overall I don't think these would be difficult classes to maintain and they represent what I think could be done with the types of information currently available. But if we start to request and demand more information about the origins of new frogs brought in, the quality of information and what we can do towards maintaining wild type specimens will only improve.