Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I'm curious about the importance of locality as far as looks go? I know it is imporant scientifically to know where an animal was collected. Can't animals from different localities have the same general appearance. Don't animals from the same clutch have different patterns and colors? It seems graybanded collectors are more concerned with the locality than most other collectors.
I just wondering if this is just a ploy to raise prices of certain animals.

I believe some localities do exhibit certain traits, or they are more prone to exist within a certain locality (black head caps, speckling, light ground color, etc.). However, it does appear you can find similar patterns/colors within all the locality based animals (ie, broad banded blairs phase, thin banded alternas, light/dark groundcolor). Locality also proves to a degree that an animal is pure and not a hybrid that was bred to accentuate desirable patterns or colors (which may have happened to thayeri kings). Some people like locality because it gives perspective to the actual geography and ecosystem the animals were captured/derived from, or the rarity of the species in that area. I love locality animals, but nice generics make me drool too!! At one point I was getting big into the locality thing, but realized I was keeping ugly, picky animals for not other reason then where their genes were from. It didn't really make sense to me, so I am not as gung ho about locality as I once was.

Thayeri were line-bred to accentuate their bright colors/patterns. These thayeri specimens are not a result of breeding hybrids. Yes, there are plenty of albino ruthveni x thayeri crosses out there. There are also lots of alterna x albino ruthveni crosses too. -Dan

all thayeri are hybrids. But as you pointed out, there are hybrids out there for various reasons and sad as it is, not everyone is ethical enough to sell their animals as pure ("Gee, it looks like a killer alterna phase greyband/screamer orange thayeri/wide banded blairs, so....".

KevinM

"all thayeri are hybrids"??? Could you explain what you mean by this? Thanks.

Sorry for the late reply, been out of town for a couple of weeks. As far as the thayeri comment, I do not think their lineage is as traceable to locality as much as alternas are able to be done. Also, their is quite a bit of taxonomic diagreement concerning the various "subspecies" such as mexicana, thayeri, and greeri within the complex. I think it is quite possible there are more mexicana/greeri, thayeri/mexicana, etc. crosses going on in the complex than with alterna. Some taxonomists feel the "subspecies" are just geographic variations, not valid subspecies. So, I would assume to them breeding a greeri to a thayeri is similar to breeding a Miami phase corn from Dade County to an Okeetee corn from Jasper County. Simply color variants, not subspecies. I quess the term integrade would have been a more acceptable term than hybrid since hybrid implies two very different species, or even genus'. However, this is only my opinion.

KevinM

People prefer localitiy verses non locality for diferent reasons. Personally, I prefer to produce animals that are as close to what you could find in the wild as possible. You can find alterna phase on Juno road and alterna phase on the river road but same as they may be, they look totaly different to me.There will come a time when we won't be able to collect wild animals anymore and the few people who keep their gene pools seperate will have the only representation of wild animals in captivity. If you breed two different dogs together they call it a mutt, it might be bigger or prettier but it is still a mutt.
I am sure this will attract all kinds of debate, but why not breed locals?