Posted by:
Dread
at Fri Sep 15 21:49:21 2006 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Dread ]
Absolutely nothing wrong with the original, and that's why there will always be beautiful "wildtype" individuals available from big breeders and pet-stores alike. An important distinction right away is "normal" and "wildtype". I can guarantee you that if 99% of WC pythons imported were Bumblebees there would be selective breeding projects to get at the elusive "normal" that we know and love. Normal only means it's the most common, not the best, not the worst, just the majority. So the better term is wildtype, so there is no biological value placed on the different morphs.
When it comes to selective breeding, line breeding, etc., you may have a point. But, take a look around at the most frequently line-bred snakes: corns and balls. These animals are coming from a wild stock with much greater diversity than our domestic dogs and cats. As well, selective breeding of ball pythons in particular hasn't been happening on a substantial scale for much more than 20 years. Domesticating cats and dogs started a looong time ago and took a very different path than what selective breeding of snakes is and will take. German Shepherds and Miniature Schnauzers and Lhasa Apsos and and were all bred with an ideal in mind. And each subsequent generation is held up to a breed standard weeding out the variation and compounding the detriments of inbreeding. Ball pythons in particular are being bred to create exciting new pattern and colour combinations. There will never be centuries of line breeding to create the "perfect" spider or even the perfect killer bee, yet as far as I know all spiders are descended from just one snake.
I'll have to refresh my vertebrate genetics, but I do believe the negative effects of inbreeding are substantially reduced in reptiles when compared to mammals. Anecdotal evidence of purebreed dogs plagued by genetic defects and healthy lines of severely inbred snakes is one part of this impression. The other is that the reptiles are a much older group than mammals. There has been a lot more genetic experimentation over evolutionary time with mammals creating many new successful forms in a short period of time, but also leaving evolution some time to weed out the problems inherent with such genetic innovation.
To finish, I think the general public is aware of the negative impacts of inbreeding in mammals, and sub-consciously or actively will act to avoid the same kind of line breeding with reptiles, perhaps being overly cautious in this respect.
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RE: What's wrong with the Original - Dread, Fri Sep 15 21:49:21 2006
