Should albinos, hybrids, etc. be discouraged?

I don't really remember saying much on this topic, however, I have some thoughts. I would now consider myself an outsider to the hobby, but my roots have come from it. I see the hobby giving more and more importance to locality specific animals in the future. Even at NWFF there was dissenting opinions as to where a red D. ventrimaculatus came from and if it was the same type as another. Later on, they did find out that it was the same line as the other type. This information is valuable in my opinion. In my talk at NWFF I tried to show and explain some of the different populations of frogs you will find and what separates them. I didn't think nearly as much of that as I do now with helping people figure out where frogs are from. I'm very exicted if any of this information will help people beyond mere curiosity. I've been thinking most of the day on and off about various types of D. auratus and how they do or do not change in appearance from Nicaragua to parts of Panama. I'm leaning on the Caribbean types not varying much. Of course all the real diversity is in Panama, but there is a large, noticable distinction between the coasts as well (of Costa Rica). When I was down there I wanted to start working more on morph guides, but I think my next trips there will make more of an official effort again. If nothing else, it would be nice to start to standardize names of localities etc.
j

Yeager said:

I would now consider myself an outsider to the hobby, but my roots have come from it. I see the hobby giving more and more importance to locality specific animals in the future.

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Well you can pretend to be an outsider all you want but you are one of us. How's the dome? Itchy?

Justin makes some great points as usual. I think as people like him and other serious hobbyist collect information about morphs in the wild and make contact with people working with frogs at the export end, we'll start to see better locality data for the frogs. If the suppliers know that the market is asking for locality data, I think they will supply it. Approaching the CITES committee might be worth a shot but I don't hold much hope for them getting on board. Managing the treaty is a huge job and requiring locality data is a wee bit outside of their scope. I'm guessing they would consider their job stopping at regulating how many of what species come out of which countries. If animals are to go into a conservation program, it has generally been up to the parties involved in that program to obtain adequate data with their specimens. One tact with CITES might be to describe it as a way to more finely track harvest pressures but given that most countries can't even track their whole country, it is probably asking too much. Nice thought though.

The head is burnt and peeling, but otherwise alright.

As for the locality info, I agree that importers could/would get some information to a certain extent. I sincerely doubt that the people actually collecting the animals would give the exact area where they're found. I'm not even sure if they could if probed. I think the best people could hope for is approximate areas-- nearest large town. That would give you enough information to go on as for elevation (for temp. purposes) and keeping track of where things are from. The nice thing about these Panamanian imports we see now is that many are from islands that are mutually exclusive. It is very easy for people who have been there to tell you where it comes from. I find it hardest with things like D. auratus and the current debate and figuring out where they come from if they don't fit one of the pattern types. This is all very interesting though. I would not be suprised if locality specific is the next trend when you all tire of the quinquevittatus group...
j

You know Justin I don't know.

I am purely guessing, but I assume that fawn breeders didn't want to compete with another color. My pug Lester is a black male from an apricot dad, his mom was black. The dad has a really dark fawn coat, but I don't know the real reason. The breeder told me it was a rare color now, but that didn't make the dog any more valuable.

I like Tad's suggestion towards the direction that he is going. I do not want to see frogs broken down into lines of championships. The breeding lines would get too thin with people trying to establish the standard and repeating it. And that's not what it is about. Its about having good healthy frogs.

Following liniage is a good start. But I don't think I can go back that far. Maybe my F1's to the P1's parents but that is it. And although I do not have any, what about wild caughts?
Dave

Yeager said:

I would treat them as WC if they ever came in again. I, as well as the gov't consider them endemic species now. I think they are now significantly different than the founder population, and that's where I base my decision on that. I don't consider them hybrids or any bit less worthy than any other population.
j

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On the other hand it is clear that the genetics of the Hawaiian frogs are a subset of those found on Taboga. I could see it played either way. You could either maintain the Hawaiians separate or mix the with Toboga since I don't think you are polluting the Toboga line with really anything new. Keeping them separate is probably the safest bet though. There is no way to unmix genes.

Interesting that Hawaii considers these "endemic species" since that requires a redefinition of the word endemic. Endemics are considered species or subspecies found in an area but nowhere else. At best these are a naturalized or feral introduced species. Unfortunately there are negative connotations with the word feral since many of the species we are most familiar with also cause ecological problems but many feral species settle in nicely to native communities without problems.

Re: You know Justin I don't know.

ED's_Fly_Meat_Inc said:

I do not want to see frogs broken down into lines of championships. The breeding lines would get too thin with people trying to establish the standard and repeating it. And that's not what it is about. Its about having good healthy frogs.

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That's right. In fact, the guidelines would be designed specifically to AVOID developing appearance standards which is unfortunately the natural direction that breeding takes. We tend to look at our frogs and choose the most similar looking specimens to breed with each other. Hobbyists often see differences in color, pattern, or size and assume that these differences much represent different "morphs" so they separate according to these differences to produce new lines of completely invented morphs. This leads to the cloneification of lines in captivity while populations in the wild show a good deal of variability. The breeding guidelines would give guidance on things like optimum founding population size, degree of line breeding/outcrossing, number of breeding colonies to maintain stability in the hobby, and guidance for determining what population a frog really belongs to. The result should be frogs that exhibit variability more like what is found in the wild without destroying the unique characters of a particular population.

ED's_Fly_Meat_Inc said:

Following liniage is a good start. But I don't think I can go back that far. Maybe my F1's to the P1's parents but that is it. And although I do not have any, what about wild caughts?
Dave

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Few of us can trace our frogs back to the "promised land". But that's not necessary to maintain what I suggest as a hobbyist grade line. For example, the thin-lined vittatus that were once considered lugubris before I had their DNA sequenced can be traced to a breeder importer who sold frogs to Mike Shrom but not back to their location of origin. That's okay though because that's enough information to link all the frogs to a common origin and maintain them as a distinct line. These frogs are widely distributed in the hobby and at least several breeders have been maintaining them true to their line. A few IAD's back, Brian Kubicki looked at the frogs and even thought he knew approximately where they might have originated from as he had seen similar vittatus in CR smacked up against the mountains separating vittatus from lugubris if I remember right which is cool to think about in its own right. So despite not being able to trace the frogs all the way back to locality, I think there is a pretty convincing line of evidence that these frogs hail from a different genetic population than the more typical vittatus with wider stripes.

In some ways I think WC are even easier because you can often tie the animals to a particular shipment or importation. For example the blue jeans pumilio that came in from Nicaragua in 2000. A number of people got them and several are still floating around alive. It seems likely that these animals all came from the same wild population so that group of shipments makes a convenient glue to base a line on. Of course this line might be too narrow since blue jeans may actually be one very large population that stretches from Nicaragua through much of CR but it will be easy to expand the line later if Justin or one of our other tropics-trekking experts tells us to. It is much more difficult to "unhybridize" a line. What I'd like to see in the guidelines is a formalized approach to using the various forms of information available to determine where breeding line designations should be formed. It would be really nice to have a worksheet you could walk through that could help guide determinations of genetic lines.

So the upshot is that its important to distinguish that we are wanting to develop breeding guidelines and NOT breeding standards. Rather than dictating what the animals should look like, we are developing practices that would produce animals that should look similar to a wild population, whatever that appearance might be. Notice that oddball animals are pretty well covered under this model. An oddball would be culled only if it is likely that natural selection in the wild would have taken it out of the breeding population. Otherwise, the oddball is treated just like any other member of the population so those genes get masked and unmasked at some frequency similar to what happens in the wild.

Finally, I would include parental care behavior in the guidelines. Parental care in dendrobatids is certainly one of the more interesting aspects of these animals and it would be ashame to lose these traits in captivity. Logic suggests that at best artificially rearing eggs and tads eliminates selection for parental care and at worst actually selects against parental care. That doesn't mean the froglets produced are less healthy but I would argue that a frog that has lost parental care is less interesting than one that retains it. Two suggestions have been proposed on frognet to address this. One is to place a premium on "naturally reared" animals. The second is to batch test lines for parental care. I proposed that guidelines suggest testing lines every third generation for the persistance of parental care. This would simply require setting up frogs every third generation in a vivarium with sufficient tad deposition/rearing sites and letting the adults just do their thing to see if they can successfully care for the eggs and transport the tads (or feed eggs in the case of facultative and obligate egg feeders). Three generations is arbitrary but seems reasonable in that it allows a lot of offspring produced without testing but if a line is found to have lost behaviors, you can usually find animals still living 3 generations back to fall back on to reestablish the behavior. Personally I think placing a premium on parent-raised froglets is much easier and more interesting but flexibility is good too.