Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Just thought I'd bring up a couple of different points from a completely different background. I raise seahorses and I'm a member of seahorse.org. All of my seahorses are captive-bred and are at least f3.

A lot of people try mixing wild caught and/or first generation captive born seahorses with their captive bred and it usually end up in disaster. This is after going through a long quarantine period. I'm talking over a year. There are some that start out with wild caught seahorses and add captive bred to their collection. This usually results in the captive bred seahorses perishing.

Right now, because of the CITES ruling on seahorses being endangered, which I completely support, a lot of hobbyists are bringing in wild caught to strengthen their gene pool. However, these are completely kept separate from their captive populations.

The consensus is that captive bred animals are not immuned to alot of the parasites/viruses/illnesses that wild caught individuals are. Which would make perfect sense. Some hobbyists are having success after several generations, usually two. F2's are able to be mixed in with captive populations with usually no problems.

What do you think about this? Do you think this would apply to bearded dragons also?

These babies will be followed closely whether they remain with me or the breeders they are going to. There is a website for storing information on each of them and the owners that will raise them agree to contribute to that data for the future of others and open studies.

The only full study I know of that has been done was in Germany with groups of german giant. Due to their superior resistance to infectious disease, which is thought to be from years of careful captive breeding and the development of strong immune system responses they were bred to offspring(F-1) of recent wild-caught dragons(F-0). The offspring of those bred are not at this time proving to be any more hardy or disease resistant than the orignal GG's(up to F-3), but there were no problem or weak offspring, in fact the clutches were very large and the females had little problems recovering from being gravid. These were hardy dragons to begin with. The theory is that it will take several generations to confer the immunities of each.

We have one of those earlier produced babies daughters'(F-2) and she has been remarkable healthy her whole life which is 2.5 years now and she is a big girl. In 2001 she showed minimal amounts of coccidia when we had two others who were loaded, that she was in with not related to her. They had a heck of a time getting clean fecals, she was clean in two weeks with only good cleaning, no meds treatments. That has been all the problem that has showed in her in those 2.5 years (besides being spoiled rotten)

We have 5 adult females and 2 adult males right now, and I can honestly say we do see a big difference in her from the others, not only is she much larger, even that our other GG, she is much smarter and demanding also. Big problem we ran into that was not expected, she would not breed this year.. I mean NO way, she about beat up the poor guy that we thought was a prime male, we looked 6 months to find him. Ronnie of Australian Beardies Herpetoculture thinks that although she is so large, she is not sexually mature yet, so we stopped trying to breed her and are waiting for next year.

Only time will tell and give us the answers we seek and what we hope to be able to do with not only these babies, but the ones prior that are still being studied.