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I went to the pet store today to get some wax worms for my uros and when I went to pay for the food a guy had an albino uro in his hand. I asked him a few questions and he said he hatched the uro, and it is a female mali. It is 1.5 years old and he is going to try to breed it with one of his males from the clutch that produced the albino. I have to say that uro was awsome.
How rare do you think it is??

If I understand you correctly the owner is planning to breed her with one of her "siblings???" Now there's a responsible breeder. Screw genetics if I can make a buck.

BigT

I haven't personally done this, but breeders do breed with a sibling when they have a trait as rare as an albino if there aren't others available to breed with it. It isn't considered to be a bad thing, snake breeders I know do it regularly and lizard breeders do it, too. I think then, they say, you just don't breed back to the same genetic line again. We just have moral ideas about it that lizards don't think about. However they also say the lizard isn't considered as "strong" in some ways, or certain people do, so they later try to bring other non-related ones in if possible. It's something I haven't gotten into but have just read about.

I think I read in a reptile magazine that monitor breeders breed their monitors with ones from the same clucth to get brighter colors in the such. I don't approve of it.. I think it's just plain stupid.

I'd have to agree with popular public opinion here. By in-breeding, these breeders cause their animals to become weaker and weaker with every generation until they produce nothing but sickly ones. In-breeding with dogs and cats is very frowned upon for this reason so why should the rules be any different for lizards? The breeder that I got Ra from clearly states that she absolutely refuses to breed her lizards with siblings to achieve certain colour patterns. She will do her best to get good breeding stock from other breeders instead. If this albino uro breeder keeps the genes "within the family", the offspring may be sickly and die early and this albino uro will have lost many good breeding years before he realizes his mistake (if he realizes it at all). It isn't so much about the animal's personal welfare so much as it is for the next generation's overall health. Should he get a few more albinos and they die off early after selling them, will he not have several angry uro owners knocking his door down demanding their money back? He'd be better off breeding it with a fresh blood-line until he can find another albino. Who knows, he may never get another albino if he breeds it with a sibling anyway. Genetics is a tricky thing.

You must also realize that what claims to be an albino uro that he has (not saying it isn't) most likely didn't come about from two albino parents... so maybe certain uros had certain traits that you must look for first.. and when he does stumble stupidly upon them... well.. hopefully he'll realize... "Well... if.. I breed my uros with their siblings not only is it morbid and wrong... it's.. just sheer stupidity to do so". I'm not saying this guy is a moron for wanting more albino uros in this world.. I'm saying he'd be a moron if he went about it the way I am speaking of.

So it may have taken someone billions of years to get this albino uro... so maybe when it dies in the near future.. and when we have 3 or more uromastyx.. we can clone them all and tghen we'll wish we had our malis back!!