So whats the actual deal with breeding albino to albino??? Seems to be some conflicting information... I hear from many breeders that albino to albino produces bad results and I seen a few people say they have great results...



So, my question is, does albino to albino breedings result in bad hatch rates due to infertility or weak genetics or was this just something that breeders made up in order to keep albino production down and their animals priced higher???



It seems that UK folks never heard of this... I have my own view but I need some "back up" on what I feel the truth is...



I would assume that you are going to get a variance of answers on this depending on who you talk to. While I have not heard of this about Albinos, it's a common topic surrounding the Pink Pastel line.



Perhaps those that are working with a lot of inbred/linebred animals are witnessing these types of problems. After all, there are a lot of healthy Albino groups out there being bred and if anybody is having any problem with them, they are keeping quiet about it. But if any one animal comes from a weak lineage that was perhaps inbred too much, then those weak genes could follow that animals progeny until they are hopefully diluted down by outcrossing them to unrelated animals. At worst, the bad genes can sometimes be locked into the same loci as the mutant genes and these are very very difficult to remove if at all regardless of how much you try to outcross your animals.



That is probably why people suggest het to het pairings because most of the time, people are producing these hets by buying one mutant animal and breeding it to an unrelated normal animal to produce hets which is a common and cheap means of producing the mutant phenotype you want. Unfortunately, those that typically buy pairs of mutant phenotypes generally purchase related pairs from a single person with the hopes of breeding them together, this of course can have detrimental side effects that you are probably hearing about. If possible, always try to purchase your pairing animals from 2 different people who hopefully have good outcrossed lines so that this reduces the possibility of genetic problems.



I doubt however that it's simply a myth created to control the market prices, after all, look at how much albinos have gone down in the last couple of years, almost 66% with more being produced each and every year.



If anything, I would expect the majority of the problems to come from linetrait animals considering that those are often created by inbreeding as much as possible to maintain the linetrait that is present. That's why Mendelian traits (dominant, co-dominant, recessive) can be much nicer to work with because you can actually create hets using one mutant phenotype to outcross more easily for the specific trait you are working with. That's not to say that Mendelian traits are flawless, because you can still have bad Mendelian genes that are passed down. But at least they can be a bit better controlled because you aren't forced to have to inbreed as much to reproduce the wanted phenotype.



Linetraits are far more difficult to reproduce as linetrait animals are considered polygenic which means that those phenotypic traits are created by more than one gene and are far more difficult to reproduce unless you are inbreeding (linebreeding) your stock to keep reproducing them or you are able to get fresh wild caught stock that also carries those genes to help add to your bloodlines. That is probably why you do not see too many Extreme Red Albinos out there, because if you were to breed your Extreme Red Albino to a regular albino, the ability to reproduce that nice red color is probably going to be dimished by gene dilution of the regular albino. You might be able to reproduce an Extreme Red if you inbred the F1 offspring to it's Red parent, but now you are having to inbreed quite a bit to keep that line going and who knows what bad genes might eventually come out and corrupt the whole line. That might also be where some of these stories are coming from.



I would really love to hear the actual accounts from breeders that are having these problems though as only they can attest to what is really happening with the specific animals they are working with and exactly what the lineage is of the animals that are producing these problems.



Just my 2 cents. I hope some of that is helpful and relevant to the discussion.




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Troy Rexroth

Rextiles

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