Should albinos, hybrids, etc. be discouraged?

I love threads like this. .About a year and a half ago I bought 3 "orange" bicolors from Patrick.He told me that he wasn't sure they would breed true colorwise and told me when he had to move them from one tank to another his hands started burning.So I am thinking they may have been wc's.He said they came in from a Eurpoean shipment.Correct me if I'm wrong Patrick.
Anyway, one has a bright orange back and black belly that goes up to the base of its bottom jaw,he is my male.One of the females has a yellow back that changes to greenish colored legs and a mottled yellow belly with black.The 3rd one, a female has some orange on her back that turns peach colored on her side and also has the yellow/orange mottled color on her belly.So, in my opinion,bicolors can throw several different colors in froglets.I hope to be able to say so someday.
I can't agree more about the parental raising of tads.In my imitators my male I have now was raised up by his parents and he has done the same things so I am up to my 2nd generation on that with the froglets I have now.
I'd sure hate for them to lose parental care in captivity.I have spent alot of evenings watching my male convince the female to come and lay eggs for the tads they had in brom axils.It beats the hell out of TV for sure.
They only produced 3 froglets for me so far since they started breeding but it was well worth it.I encourage anyone working with imitators to let them do it for a cycle.It is well worth it.

Mark W.

Keeping up parental care

I remember when this was brought up on frognet and I loved the idea. This does seem to be something we definately select against as we raise the tadpoles ourselves, be it because its fun for us, produces bigger froglets, or because we get more froglets this way to sell.

All the frogs I have had showed parental care because thats how I set up their tank. So with the tricolor and truncatus I didn't have to do it that way, I could have just taken all the eggs, but when I got swamped with eggs or tads, or was just feeling lazy, or was busy, blah blah blah I just left them in there. I would usually find a couple tadpoles in the 'pond' of the tank, though not usually as many as there were eggs in the clutch. Sometimes I even left the tadpoles in the ponds, ocassionally giving them food, I wouldn't even take them from there (I got a LOT of tricolor and even 3 truncatus froglets this way). With my imitator, I didn't even know they laid eggs when I found a tadpole... and I obviously wasn't going to take eggs out of a pumilio tank (when I did even find a clutch).

Its not hard at all to test this, at least the way I set up tanks. Plus I LOVE finding parents with tadpoles on their back! It really is amazing to watch.

I'm still hyped about this idea and would love to get in on the project.

E. silverstonei

I'm having issues viewing that page so I'm gonna take some wild guesses.

For one, it could be the camera. The pictures I could see didn't show the best representation of color.

The other part is what I've seen in santa isabel tricolors. These guys can be blaring fire engine red in the wild, but a lot of people have adult breeders that are more of a bubblegum pink with more white than bright yellow lines. This is dietary, and if you add the right stuff to an awsome diet, you'll have awsome frogs. It can still take these guys a long time to color up even with that. Epipeds seem more dependent on diet for color than some other darts.

With tricolors I use a lot of stuff with betacarotine (sp?) in it (paprika in FF cultures and dust, sweet potatoes feed to pinhead crickets, even Tracy Hick's idea of Beets in the FF mix) as well as sprulina/chlorella in their diet from tadpoledom. Also good is a wide range of food if you can, especially field sweepings. The more complete the diet, the brighter the frog. In the US the idea doesn't seem as popular for some reason (more effort?) as I've gotten critisism for doing this, but its done in europe, and the field sweepings seem to help.

Frogs fed this diet, like WCs, and switched to a diet not with these additives will fade (or in the case of froglets, not color up as fast or any more than they are).

Personal thought on the albinos... I've seen vittatus, tincs, and eventually when I get this website to work, auratus too. In the reptile world, I've seen a lot of other species as albinos (including the leopard geckos I worked with for so long). I think they all look like raw chicken with fat on it (the yellow). After spending a lot of money on Hets when I finally hatched out my first albino leopard gecko, I thought it was really ugly. I sold the group and babies right after that.

Albino leopard geckos are light sensitive until around 6 months... I wonder if these guys are too? Or if they had feeding problems due to bad eyesite? I can't see albinos in a good way at this point... they die in the wild from predation as well as other problems caused by lack of pigment (they have it for a reason). If I had an albino pop up in my breeding, I'd set it aside to live its life, but never breed it.

Morphs variations can of worms...

Now that I'm back in the States I finally got to look at that page with the albino auratus. Just... ew. You guys already know the rest of my views on that lol. Second, the silverstonei ARE really orange... but I hold to what I said before. A little bit the camera, a lot of it the diet.


Warning: I'm kinda ranting and frognetters have probibly read this before. But I still want to do it lol.

Ok, so flipping through Justin's pics, and through the auratus, tinc, and pumilio morph guides on http://www.tropical-experience.nl a thought popped into my head as it had done repeatidly over the last couple years, the more I hear about these frogs. I have posted this idea on frognet.

This is mostly based off my ideas about bestimentos pumilio, so they are gonna be my main example. Ok, so the red bastimentos (not talking orange red to yellow ones, I'm talking RED) are supposidly a distinct bastimentos form on the island going by others' observations (it came up last time I had a go around with this idea). Going by ideas brought up here, you breed red to red as thats what they do in the wild. What about the other bastimentos?

http://www.yeagersfrogs.com/007B.jpg

These are the 'orange', 'green/yellow', 'gold dust', 'white' bastimentos forms. Hell, that one frog in the pic defies description... is it a "white" basti... but it has the orange/red on it... not to mention green. Talk about variation. All these frogs were found at the base of the SAME TREE in the wild. Obviously some overlap here. I've seen these frogs seperated into orange bastis, green/yellow bastis, rarer are the gold dust and recently imported white bastis. Orange bastis are the most often available, thus the "cheapest" or "most common". The rest are extremely rare, and thus expensive, more valuable to breed them true. But if in the wild they habitat together... why not try to breed them together?

To answer my own question, I know Kyle Summers' article on pumilio showing a preference for like colored frog over vioce and size and what not, I have the article, have read it numorous times, talked to the author himself, and seen and worked with some of the frogs that were part of the project. In a mixed tank where each frog was a different morph (mind you not just different colored bastis, they were even from different islands, nancys and popes were included as well I remember clearly). This produced a number of mutts kind of reluctantly (the ugliest pummies I've ever seen). But this was taking different island and mainland panama morphs and putting them together, not just different bastis.

What to do? Got a 75 gallon tank handy, set up for frogs, and a colony of various basti morphs? Why stick them together and see what happens! If they breed true, cool, if they don't they might not in nature (mind you this implies that each animal would have available mates from their own 'color' to choose from as well as other colors). Huh, I've got the tank available to me... anyone know a way for me to get money or a small grant to test this project? It'd be interesting to see.

'Lemon drop' tincs are suppose to be a line of 'saul' yellowback tincs. Are these, btw, the same as the regular yellowbacks floating around the hobby? If so, even more interesting... I know some people may want to breed the more expensive lemon drops because they are, well, more expensive, and/or don't really know/care that they are sauls. 'reticulated' auratus are suppose to be the same deal, a line of 'taboga' auratus. Actually, speaking of 'taboga' auratus, tropical-experience.nl has 3 versions of 'taboga' (4 if you include hawaiian)... why not do the mixed colony stated above with the 'taboga' auratus? Then again, aren't the retics supposed to be a line from 'hawaiian-taboga' auratus? A line from a line... yeesh. I'm getting a bit muddled now. Too many morph guides... and jumping back on the hawaiian auratus debate.

Just stirring the pot a little more

Re: Morphs variations can of worms...

KeroKero said:

This is mostly based off my ideas about bestimentos pumilio, so they are gonna be my main example. Ok, so the red bastimentos (not talking orange red to yellow ones, I'm talking RED) are supposidly a distinct bastimentos form on the island going by others' observations (it came up last time I had a go around with this idea). Going by ideas brought up here, you breed red to red as thats what they do in the wild. What about the other bastimentos?

Click to expand...

In my opinion bastis are the poster child for what breeding guidelines would be meant to do. I agree with you 100% that many of the basti "morphs" should be thrown together. Let's assume Summers is right and bastis exhibit sexual selection for similar looking frogs. I have no reason to doubt this although I haven't read the paper myself so can't comment on the strength of the stats. Regardless, how strong of a genetic isolator would sexual selection on an island population be? There is no way that sexual selection is creating an absolute barrier in the basti population. Just look at the gradation of morphs on the island. We aren't talking about 2, 3, 4, or more distinct color morphs. What we have is a continuous range of morps. This alone is strong evidence for an interbreeding population. If the frogs were segregating absolutely, then we would see a set of distinct morphs that could somewhat easily be placed into categories. But that's not what we have. We have all of these in between frogs that are difficult to say whether they belong to one morph or another so we continue to subdivide into more and more "morph" names to accomodate this variation.

Now if we think about the mechanism of sexual selection, this variation due to interbreeding becomes even more clear. Let's assume the female is responsible for choosing the mate. Her choice is limited to the number of sexually mature males within her territory. I have no idea how many males that might be but it's safe to assume that the number is less than the total number of males on the island. So from this group of males she has to choose a male that looks most similar to her. It's unlikely that she will find a mate that looks exactly like herself so what are her limits? What does she do if she can't find a similar enough looking male? Does she obstain from reproducing or does she just choose the closest match? My bet is that she mates with the closest match. The closeness of this match may be limited by her potential mates. Next we should consider what is her range of detection? By this I mean what are her limits to determining if a potential mate looks "like her". When we segregate these frogs into morph classes, we do so somewhat arbitrarily. We look at the frog and then consider the number of morphs that are recognized by others and we put the frog into whatever class we think it most closely fits. So how many "morphs" do you suppose our female frog recognizes? What range of color, pattern, or call do you suppose she considers the same. Surely she has a little lattitude in this choice. Otherwise she would probably only find very closely related frogs to be suitable mates. The obvious answer here is that there is a range of variability within these choices. An orange frog may mate with a slightly more red or yellow frog, the offspring of that pairing would do the same and so on which still yields a population of continously variable frogs despite sexual selection for similar looking mates.

So as far as your experiment goes, I'm all for it. I would love to see froggers more willing to mix different morphs of frogs that come from a common population. In this case it would be particularly interesting to see how sexual selection might affect the outcome.

To clarify things a little bit...

The Summers ‘Visual Mate Choice in Poison Frogs’ paper was between morphs from different islands, in this case Pope Island and Nancy Key. Again, preference seemed to be based on color.

A detailed field study on the mate choice of the Bastimentos population specifically would be interesting. It is possible that color preference is not as prominent on this island, or that other selection cues take precedence. It is probable that frogs collected within a territorial range form a breeding population (ie. the frogs in the Yeager pic). One question which Justin Yeager might be able to answer is whether there are overall densities of one color or another within different territorial ranges?

In the recent Summers paper where he cross-breeds different morphs, the Bocas Island (looked similar to the yellow/green basit in the Yeager pic) x Almirante (red) resulted in a phenotype similar to the muddy white/red basit in the Yeager pic. So it is possible that Bastimentos population is color mixing to some degree.

An aside about pumilio territories: a paper by Pröhl found that females maintain territories with good tad rearing sites, and that males defend territories which have higher female densities. Females have larger range territories and do visit several males for courtship, which makes it likely that they will have the opportunity to select ‘like colored males’ should they choose.

I'm at my parent's hous getting some car repairs, so sorry for my absence. I agree with Corey that the Bastimentos are really the best ("Bestimentos"), but there was a lot of variation. Of the picture of the handful, there were a few more frogs which were on that same tree. I would have had to do more of an official survey of the area (aka a plot, etc) to tell you exactly what was going on, but there was several others in that area. I selected on from each of the different color 'morphs' for the photograph (it was hard enough to get 4 frogs to sit still for a photo I'm taking with the other hand...). A very interesting note was that the diversity of D. pumilio types was only in the town side of the island of Bastimentos. On red frog beach and that area, there was no real differences in color other than the degree of white on the feet/legs. Why is only half the island subject to having such variations in color and pattern? I would be interested in looking into it more on a return visit. As for the breeding idea, I would be most interested in working on that project too if anyone wants to donate animals. I will figure out what my budget is for my masters thesis from the school soon, and then I will begin to apply for other grants. I have several projects going already, but another observation project on behaviors would not be too much more work to do. We have a large tank, maybe 150 gallons in the lab. I would estimate this would be around the size of a male's territory in the wild. What would be most interesting would be to have a greenhouse with them in it and regularly monitor mating groups and keep track of which mates with which. I think that would be easier than doing it in the field, and more realistic than an aquarium. I will continue looking into this when I get back to my apartment. I have spoken to my professor I'll be working under about doing the behavioral study on if the frogs have lost the parental care-- if it has been 'selected against, or not selected for-- and he was very excited to work with that as well. In any event, I have to get going, but I will be back to discuss this more later.
j

I wouldn't think it would be super difficult to study this in the wild. What you would have to do is establish a plot and identify every frog and its sex in the plot. You would also want to ID and sex every frog in a surrounding buffer zone which may come in your plot. After that you would probably (but not that necessary) want to establish home ranges for each individual (this should be fairly different for males than females according to other research). From this, you will know your sample group fairly well. I don't think of D. pumilio as moving much unless disturbed greatly from their home ranges, so you could start from there. You would have to then identify every possible tadpole deposition site and then also check for tadpoles in each of them in your plot. From that, you would have to identify the females for each tadpole, and if possible, the males. From a logistic and practicality view, this would be one of the projects that I think would be better suited for the lab. Being able to establish and also standardize tadpole sites would simplify things a great deal. Also being able to select the numbers and numbers color variants for the experiments would also be nice. I think it would be nice to start with two color variants and then move your way up to as many as possible. I'm going to be writing up a proposal later this week for this, so I could share it later if people are interested. I just worry a bit about piracy of ideas, as this is a general forum and also online. In any event, I'll be working on it more later.
j

P.S. In case you couldn't tell from this, I much prefer to study animals in their natural habitat, but some things can be made much simplier in the lab.