Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Just how important is the size of a Beardie? If a dragon appears healthy, eats well, is active and appears healthy is size a factor in determining health?

How important is size in breeding? If you have a pair of dragons that is smaller in size (under 15" and under 300 grams) would it be ok for them to breed? Would breeding small dragons give you mini-dragons like Rankins? Wouldn’t the eggs be small too? Has anyone ever done a breeding project of this type for size?
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Bennett

www.beardiedragon.com

their size has been diminishing in the United States... why?

They are suppose to have better diets, better supplements etc..... but the one thing they do not have is diversity of breeding. More and more breeders are having a hard time finding unrelated dragons to theirs and reporting the size of thier dragons to be decrease with each generation.

Many feel the diminishing size is a direct result of inbreeding lines as that is one of the most common found problems in dragons that are known to be inbreed.

We do not breed small dragon, no matter how healthy they appear individually, if they are not normal size there is a reason, and the gene pool here is already pretty mucked up, we don't want to add to that.... too many are already.

Let them be pampered pets, they can make splendid ones, we need to try and perserve this species as best we can in captivity and the only way to do that is for breeders to work together to bring back the strenght and size that they originated from. It is one thing that CAN make us different from the Pet Stores supplied dragons, that few survive very long. There is fast coming a time when vitticeps will be a common and cheap as iguana's went, the only thing that will keep good breeders going is the quality they produce that can not be found just anywhere.

you would think it wouldnt be so hard to find dragons that are at least only very distantly related. do you think the internet and the subsequent ease of buying beardies from aroudn the country is a big factor? ie i can buy a dragon from person A and B, and breed them. person C does the same thing, and i get a dragon from them and breed with the offspring from A and B not knowing theyre related
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proud mama to:
1.0.0 ball python (mr snake),0.0.1 albino florida kingsnake (CK),1.0.0 leopard gecko (sebastian),0.1.0 colombian rainbow boa (luce),1.1.0 bearded dragon (kaipo and dulce), 1.1.0 colombian redtailed boas (adam and eve)

Only a few dragons originally came into the country, and since exports from Australia are illegal, ALL the dragons we have are decended from those few. I think we've been very lucky that worse problems haven't arisen.
Also, there's no point in breeding tiny pagonas when you can just buy a Rankin's if you want a small one . For the record, I have a runt too, but I think the cause may have been environmental.

i dont know much about genetics...it just seems to me that by now, the dragons would be so distantly related that it wouldnt be a problem, as opposed to breeding siblings and such. ah well. ill resist the urge to throw in a kentucky or west virginia joke here
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proud mama to:
1.0.0 ball python (mr snake),0.0.1 albino florida kingsnake (CK),1.0.0 leopard gecko (sebastian),0.1.0 colombian rainbow boa (luce),1.1.0 bearded dragon (kaipo and dulce), 1.1.0 colombian redtailed boas (adam and eve)

I'm new to bearded dragons, but just by looking at the classifieds and on the forums. It seems alot of dragons are related. For one, there's always people looking for a cheap female that is ready to breed next season. Half of the posts in the classifieds are for dragons that are descendents of Sandfire Dragon Ranch. It seems to me that the majority of bearded dragons are descended from Sandfire Dragon Ranch. I realize that they have lots of dragons, but still the genepool seems very limited.

It does seem that the German Giant line is less likely to be related to the color morphs. Would this be a good and simple way for breeders to add more genetic diversity to their stock? I'd guess that within three generations you can build a very strong line.

It doesn't matter how many offspring a small founding group ends up having, they're still all working with the same small gene pool. Eventually new mutations would cause more variations in the gene pool, but bd's have only been bred in America for.. what, 15 years? 20 years? So even though dragons have now spread all over the US, they all have very similar genetic profiles. This is the same reason why purebred dogs, no matter how large the population currently is, end up having genetic diseases. Because the founding population was very small. We're lucky there's no BD version of hip dysplasia that we know about.