Reptile & Amphibian Forums

what are your opinions about inbreeding? I know many do with other species such as leopard geckos but how do you feel about this topic when it comes to crested's? Just wondering for future reference.

Imo the crested population in regards to the pet trade is very limited. Only a very few people got to legally collect breeding stock, most if not all cresteds are descended from this small population. With that being being said, most morphs in the reptile trade are in part being produced thru linebreeding, selective inbreeding.

Man, either the crested in your pic really needs a nice big cricket sandwich, or mine is fat. I'm betting it's the latter.
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0.1 Albino Leopard Gecko - Tigger
0.1 Crested Gecko - Pooh-Bear

no that gecko needed to eat that was just prior to its first shed. This is a sibling.

So do you think the majority of cresteds for sale are all products of line breeding. oh yea one more question, do you think it is more appropate to breed offspring back to parent r offspring to offspring?

No, thats not what i really mean. Most if not all cresteds are related, so maybe a small amount of inbreeding, there has got to be with a limited blood line. To say they are all line breed is wrong, that means a deliberate attempt to keep the gene pool shallow. I think most crested breeders, myself included, try to work with as broad a gene pool as we can.
When line breeding go adultxoffspring. Imo you at least offer a little dif genetic make up this way. Sibling to sibling breeding they are the same dna nothing new just mixing what they have already.

i understand how the crested geckos in the pt trade are probably all in someway related, but do you think crested geckos will end up like leopard geckos after a while. people wanting super dalmation reds and things like that will find it easier to selectively breed rather than wait to find another gecko similar, which makes sense.

Actually, I'm pretty sure a few folks here are confused about genetic relatedness:

Offspring resemble their parents to varying degrees, but the proportional genetic contribution of each parent is constant: half the genes of an offspring come from he the sire and half from the dam. A relatedness coefficient of 50% or 0.5 is assigned to the parent-offspring relationship.

Full siblings on average share 50% of their genes, based on the likelihood that 25% of the time they will have received the same genes from their dam and 25% of the time they will have received the same genes from their sire. It is possible, with a very small likelihood, that full siblings may have either no genes in common or all genes in common. The random assortment of chromosomes during gamete formation means that we cannot predict the exact proportion of genes that any two full siblings have in common; we can only provide an average value for full siblings as a group.

Half-siblings on average share 25% of their genes, and first cousins share 12.5%. More complicated relationships can easily be calculated. In the simplest of pedigrees evaluations, breeders may talk of "percentage of blood." Of course blood is not the vehicle of inheritance, but is used in this context to imply genetic traits. These calculations provide the most probable proportion by source for an individual's genes by summing the relatedness coefficients for every occurrence of a particular ancestor in a pedigree. The relatedness decreases by half with each succeeding generation. The sum is not an exact proportion, but a statement of the most likely percentage. It is always possible that the true genetic proportion in common could be larger or smaller than that calculated as a relatedness coefficient.

In fact, if you are concerned with "diluting" genetic relatedness, breeding animals separated by at least 2 generations (grandparent to grandoffspring for example) is a way to help avoid excessive line breeding...