Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I was curious of what the possibilities of birth defects are by breeding a father to daughter or a mother to son???

I have a pair of 100% het albinos and was thinking of keeping one of the albino offspring (if I get any) to breed back to one of the parents. But I have heard that inbreeding can cause birth defects.

Any help would be great
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Christine
Tails With Scales Reptiles
Happiness is biting my snake back!

Christine, it can but it takes a very long time to show in reptiles. Most people add a new one into the mix occassionally to keep the bloodline clean. albino to albino, and het to either, will bring about the same results in the end. Just pay attention to 'high or low contrast' to get what you want as an end result, JMO. Someone else may have a better explination than this.

Quig

The possibility of birth defects is higher in a related pair vs. a non related pair. This is because the related pair have more similar DNA than the unrelated pair. This increases the odds of them sharing a defective gene locus, which in turn can lead to birth defects. Continued inbreeding or line breeding even further reduces the amount of variability in a population, and thus the number of alleles possible for a gene locus.

However for genetic birth defects to occur the genes responsible must be present. So you should be careful even when out breeding as you can accidentally introduce a defective gene into an otherwise healthy population.

The best advise is to inbeed for 1-2 generations to obtain the desired trait. The out breed to increase heterogenetity in your population. This gives you your desired trait plus the hybrid vigor that a healthy population should have.

BTW - Hybrid vigor is a term related to increased heterogeneity in the alleles of a population and has nothing to do with hybrids. The term for hybrids would be genetic swamping, which is bad.