Genetic Diversity in a Collection

I have a couple of questions. The
first is, how do you as keepers typically maintain genetic diversity
in your collection of snakes (assuming that you breed them) or do you
pay attention to it at all? I know inbreeding happens in order to
prove out a new morph, for example breeding an unusual looking baby
back to its parent. Now, if your maintaining a small colony and
holding back a few babies as future breeders in an effort to save
money on new breeders, or if the baby has a gene that's expensive to
acquire by buying a new snake, at some point a lot of the snakes in
your collection will be related to each other. How does this impact
the snakes, or is there any measurable difference in the health of
closely related captive snakes vs their wild brothers and sisters?


My second question is this; I have seen
people on this site mention receiving papers with a newly purchased
snake. What do these papers consist of, a pedigree as well as a
feeding chart? How do you guys keep track of the lineage of the
snakes you breed and sell? Or do you keep track of this at all?

inbreeding should be avoided, except in the cases when its required.

as few inbreeding as possible, as much inbreeding as neccessary.

avoid inbreeding whenever possible. but there often are reasons to do it. to hit a super project or a recessive or double recessive project, it often cannot be avoided.

reptiles appear to be more resilient when it comes to inbreeding, compared to mammals. but that is no sure bet.

Most people seem to try pretty hard to outcross regularly within their own collection for genetic diversity. However, the idea that the overall gene pool within the hobby hasn't been inbred to a massive extent is pretty ridiculous.

Example a)
Joe proves out a new mutation. Keeps all the babies and breeds them together to see if there is a super. There is. He sells the non supers of those inbreedings to Mike, who wants in on the project, then makes sure to keep track of genetic diversity going forward. Mike loves the super and want some himself. So he inbreeds the minimal amount to get him some supers, and makes sure to outcross after that. Mike sells to Charlie, charlie sells to Judy, Judy sells to Chris and on an on it goes.

Everybody is only inbreeding as little as possible, but every time someone new comes into the project more inbreeding takes place. So ten or 15 years later the line has been inbred over and over and over again, even though everyone in the project is trying to avoid it. If you buy from chris who bought from judy who bought from charlie who bought from joe your animal has been inbred a LOT.

Example b) joe proves out a new mutation with a super. Doesnt give a crap about inbreeding and just wants to make as much money as possible. So he just keeps crossing sibs together, or offspring back to parents. 10 or 15 years down the line, if you buy from joe, it is a guarantee your babys line has been inbred over and over and over again

Example A is considered doing the right thing, example B is considered unethical. Wait, really? Whats the difference?

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Cryhavoc, its not as bad as you make it sound.

if you take a really inbred super enchi and breed it to a really inbred super fire, as long as the super enchi has different ancestors than the super fire, the offspring will not be inbred.

there are calculators that can be used to calculate an inbreeding coefficient for an individual based on all available knowledge about the ancestry. and with the right pairing, its possible to reset it back to zero.

if you go far enough back in time, every individual is related to every other individual. its even true for humans. for example, more than 30 million US citizen are related to the 102 pilgrims that arrived on the mayflower, and the majority of chinese people have Gengis Khan in their ancestry. also, most people of european descent have the ability to digest lactose, people of other origin can digest lactose as children but lose that ability in adulthood. this traces back to a single mutation that happened in a single person around 6000 years ago somewhere in central europe. so if you can tolerate fresh milk, congratulations, we are related. in iceland there is a popular smartphone app, if you enter two icelandic people, it performs a database search based on records that go back centuries, and in most cases it will find the name of the last common ancestor.

Now, I'm just going by something I heard, I think it was on here, but I can't back it up. Bps in the wild aren't all that genetically diverse to begin with. Since they don't tend to travel long distances, I think it could be said that the specimens in a given area are going to be related anyway. So it would seem that they may have a naturally occurring tolerance to inbreeding that would be lacking in more "traveled" animals. Not that I'm looking to inbreed the hack out of mine or anything, it just seems a logical explanation for why we can get away with so much of it when it very quickly has bad effects in other animals.

Got to look at the natural history of the species.
Inbreeding in reptiles is really common, even out in nature. They are a non migratory species that stay local so outcrossing to a new population is pretty rare. They couldn't tell if they were breeding a relative or not. Its safe to say that breeding with relatives is not uncommon. That's why you get special locality or specific line trait based animals of the same species. It just makes them have a higher homozygosity.

Natural selection keeps the population strong and selects against weakness/negative traits. In captivity, the humans are the ones responsible for that selection.


Inbreeding or line breeding is fine to do as long as the snakes are healthy and you don't think they carry any heritable disability. Many often prove out recessive genetics that way.
Reptiles do not have the same issues that mammals have when inbreeding or line breeding. (Not counting the morphs that are prone to genetic defects)


So with that said, if you choose to inbreed or line breed, I personally wouldn't go overboard with it and only choose to do a few generations at the very most. Breeding healthy animals should be more important than genetic potential. Although keeping low genetic diversity can also prevent you from bringing in animals with negative traits into your lines.

There are pros and cons to both outcrossing and inbreeding. Got to breed smart.

For example, I keep my rodent colony very homogeneous. I do it because I know my rats are genetically sound with no heritable illnesses. I don't want to bring in new genetics that can introduce flaws and hinder my lines.

I'd add to what Satomi was saying. There is no problem with "inbreeding" itself. All inbreeding does is increase the chance of specific genes to be turned on. Theres nothing wrong with this so long as the genes that are being turned on are healthy. The problem with mammalian inbreeding is that a lot of mammals have a ton of bad genes in their genome. You don't run into many bad genes in reptiles or insects. There are also plenty of mammals such as rodents which have little problems when they are inbred. The fact that human inbreeding even for one generation generally causes significant health concerns is a testament to how many flawed genes we still have in our genome. Many of these other types of organisms have been around far longer then mammals and have had much more time to weed out the bad genes through natural selection.

If it's a big enough concern after a few generations most breeders could simply sell or trade off their foundation stock. For instance, if I have one mohave sire and he's both daddy and granddaddy to every mohave or mohave combo in my collection, I could trade him for a different mohave male, or buy a mohave combo male to use with my girls if I wanted to try for supers, etc.

I see no reason to treat an inbred pairing any different. If issues become common, stop breeding that pair, whether they be brother and sister or 50 generations removed. If there are no issues, why the heck wouldn't you keep going? Genetic diversity is good for adapting if the status quo changes, such as a disease or environmental change. Line breeding is the way to go for a strong animal, assuming you get the right parts together.

Humans find ways to cope with the negative traits and survive, just about every other species just lets that animal die, so our gene pool filled with negative genes that should of took out some of our lines out a long long time ago. Damn developed brain screwing up our gene pool.

I've read up quite a bit about inbreeding in captivity and the wild, so I hope I can add to this conversation. Feel free to criticize:

I think the suggestion that reptiles can tolerate more inbreeding than mammals is slightly misleading. Most wild animals inbreed to a small degree without consequence, and almost all animals have some sort of method for avoiding inbreeding because of the negative consequences. Most inbreeding avoidance strategies include kin recognition (being able to tell who your relatives are), and male dispersal. There are of course a few exceptions to this rule (naked mole rats, ants and bees are the best examples of this), but I see no reason to believe that inbreeding does not effect reptiles in the same way as mammals.

Why is inbreeding bad?

As you all know, animal populations accumulate mutations. Some of these mutations are advantageous to the animal, but most of them are disadvantageous and decrease the survival of an animal. Many genetic traits work the exact same way as the color and pattern morphs that we all love. There are dominant traits, co-dominant traits, and recessive traits. I will give an example of how inbreeding causes problems, using kinking as an example of a disadvantageous trait. (Disclaimer: Im not entirely sure that kinking is caused by inbreeding, but I think it is an entirely possible explanation at least in some lines. Feel free to substitute kinking in this example with any other disadvantageous trait you can think of).

Lets pretend we are looking at a wild population, and a developing snake acquires a dominant mutation that causes kinking. Chances are that the snake will die very early on in its life. In the rare chance that the snake manages to survive and reproduce, 100% of its offspring will have kinking and also likely die. Natural selection quickly eliminates the dominant kinking gene from the population. You can imagine the same scenario where the snake instead has a co-dominant mutation, and the heterozygous form has mild kinking. The snake might survive and reproduce, but 50% of the offspring are mildly kinked. In the event that two kinked snakes mate, 25% of the offspring are the completely unviable super form. Before long, the co-dominant kinked snakes are outcompeted by the normal unkinked snakes and the gene is still removed from the population.

Now imagine the snake is born with with a recessive kinked gene. The snake is born completely healthy, and has 50% het kinked offspring that are also completely healthy. Every so often, a het kinked snake will mate with another het kinked snake and produce kinked young. For this reason, normal snakes still slightly out-compete kinked snakes, but often not enough to remove it from the population because it can always hide in the het form. Lots of disadvantageous recessive alleles occur at low frequencies in all populations, including us. Although the chance of having any particular mutation is incredibly low, the chance of having ANY such mutation is actually quite high. When mating with an unrelated individual, the chances that you are both het for the same mutation is incredibly low. The problem with inbreeding is that you share a proportion of your genes with your relatives, and the chance that you will express disadvantageous genes is much higher.


How bad is inbreeding?

So inbreeding is bad because it increases the chance that you express rare, disadvantageous, recessive alleles. However, as mentioned already in this post, most animals inbreed at least some of the time and are somewhat resilient to low levels of inbreeding. For the most part, inbreeding problems manifest themselves when you have many generations of inbreeding without introducing new genes from unrelated individuals. The likelihood of producing offspring that suffer from inbreeding depression comes down to what proportion of genes you share with your mate. Everyone shares 50% with their parents and siblings, 25% with their half siblings, 12.5% with cousins etc. By the time you get down to someone who is your third cousin you actually only less then 1% of your DNA with them.

So although I am certainly not advocating having children with your cousins, having inbreeding events every once and a while is not necessarily a bad thing (genetically speaking).

As far as snakes are concerned, inbreeding can be a problem when you are inbreeding snakes that are inbred to begin with. Inbreeding causes offspring to be more genetically related then you would expect (from the percentages above). If you bred half siblings together, normally they would share 25% of their genes, but in an inbred strain they may share 35-40% of their genes instead. Paired full-sibs that are inbred may share 75-80% of their genes.

I dont want to read all this. Just answer my question. Is it ok to inbreed my snakes?

This post is basically a long and comprehensive way of saying what several people have already said in this post. A little bit of inbreeding isn't all that bad. After all it is the only way that a breeder can start producing the recessive mutations that we all love. With that being said, its always good to throw in some genetic variation whenever you can (even if its a third or fourth cousin). When starting a breeding project from scratch, perhaps try to get your snakes from several different breeders rather then all from the same clutch. This will give you some opportunities to inbreed for a generation or two down the line with less risk.

Remember, the reason that sexual reproduction evolved was not so that animals could enjoy the orgasm. It was to promote genetic diversity. Let us all try to keep captive snake populations as diverse as possible, so we can avoid inbreeding depression now and in the future.

Cheers,
-Krynn

Krynn I completely disagree with you on this in relation to reptiles. More specifically ball pythons. They have extremely small ranges in the wild and do not just go for a walk to get away from their family. As newly hatched baby they go to the closest safe spot and shed and then to to the closest spot to eat and drink odds are that in Africa there are not many places like that and that the babies will generally go to the same spots. Yes over time they will move on to some extent but not a whole lot. Why do you think any recessive mutation has been found in the wild more than once? It is because 2 snakes carrying the same mutant genes mated and produced them. That would indicate that animals very closely related breed a lot in reptiles.

knowledge is earned not learned

Quote:

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Originally Posted by T&C Exotics

Krynn I completely disagree with you on this in relation to reptiles. More specifically ball pythons. They have extremely small ranges in the wild and do not just go for a walk to get away from their family. As newly hatched baby they go to the closest safe spot and shed and then to to the closest spot to eat and drink odds are that in Africa there are not many places like that and that the babies will generally go to the same spots. Yes over time they will move on to some extent but not a whole lot. Why do you think any recessive mutation has been found in the wild more than once? It is because 2 snakes carrying the same mutant genes mated and produced them. That would indicate that animals very closely related breed a lot in reptiles.

knowledge is earned not learned

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Hi T & C,

I am very curious how you could know this. There is very little research done on ball pythons in the wild, and nothing is known about male dispersal or kin discrimination (that I know of). If you have any sources about dispersal, I would love for you to PM them to me :). In the inbreeding depression literature, there has been alot less work done in amphibians and reptiles in comparison to mammals and birds. You would be surprised at how some individuals will travel even in seemingly stationary animals.

Yes we do get a fair amount of recessive mutations from the wild, but this is not support for the idea that wild ball pythons are inbred. Recessive mutations are rare, but present in all sorts of animal populations. This even happens even in species that we know to have methods of inbreeding avoidance. Just two summers ago, I found an albino deer mouse in a wild population that we know is not particularly inbred.

Cheers,
-Krynn

if one in 1000 animals are carriers for a recessive gene, even without inbreeding, one in a million will be a visible recessive. the natural population is gigantic, so it would show up every now and then. so thats no evidence for anything. then there are big breeding farms in africa, which have a more limited gene pool.

its just a guess, but i would not be surprised at all if males in the wild start fighting as soon as they reach sexual maturity, or maybe the adult male will drive them away.

i do believe reptiles to be somewhat more resilient when it comes to inbreeding. that doesnt mean that there wont be any negative consequences at all. if a python has a diverse genome, its immune system will have more solutions to deal with disease. so the immune system is weakened by inbreeding. which means the BP looks completely fine, but the risks that it dies from an infection may be a bit elevated. which is something you dont notice at all, until its too late. another thing that happens is that fertility goes down, this is more obvious, and i have heared breeders confirm it. if you do a lot of inbreeding (lets say you are working on a triple recessive), after a while you can notice fertility in the project going down. add new blood and it goes back up.

so i think genetic health is a real issue. and while you can get away with ignoring it for a generation or two, you should not ignore it completely.

most big breeders seem to care about the issue and say that they are taking active steps to minimize inbreeding. fortunately, the larger the collection is, the easier it gets to avoid inbreeding. as the collection size goes up, the amount of possible pairing grows exponentially, and much faster than the amount of pairings that would lead to inbreeding. with a large enough collection, its even possible to do a double recessive project without inbreeding.

Bill Brant from Gourmetrhodent has a gigantic collection, and he has a computer system in place that calculates the inbreeding coefficient for every animal in the collection, and for each hatchling he gets a number that tells him how strongly the genetics of the hatchling are already represented in the collection. basically the system calculates how closely related the hatchling is to every other snake in the collection. and he uses it to inform his decisions on what to hold back. so, some breeders REALLY invest A LOT of effort and brainpower to make sure inbreeding is under control.

I gotta disagree with the "sexual reproduction is to promote genetic diversity".

The way you stated it made me interpret that to be that sexual reproduction arose "in order to do ____". This couldn't be more incorrect and goes against everything we know about natural selection leading to "evolution".

No, sexual reproduction was merely a set of random mutations which proved to be advantageous for those organisms. There isn't a "goal" when it comes to evolution. There is simply a whole lot of random variables that either live and reproduce or die. Sexual reproduction does offer another division which increases genetic diversity within the developing embryo but this really doesn't matter in regards to inbreeding. When sexual reproduction was "selected" for the methodology of reproduction, it simply offers more variables. It doesn't make those variables better then mitotic divisions it only casts the genetic net wider.

If we artificially made a pair of organisms that were perfect but exactly the same. You could inbreed them indefinitely without issue.

Again, the problem with mammals inbreeding is that we diverged very recently in the grand scheme of life on this planet. Insects, reptiles, and micro organisms have been here far longer and have had much more time to get rid of defects. Yes inbreeding can be deleterious for an organism but it can also be beneficial. The exact same is true of very out crossed animals. Either the bad genes align up or they don't.

well, the benefit of having two copies of the genome is that one gene is broken, you are not dead. the other one simply takes over. this mechanism provides resilience against genetic defects. inbreeding undermines this mechanism.


and the benefit of sexual reproduction is the recombination of genes. if one individual has one beneficial mutation, and a different individual has a different beneficial mutation, sexual reproduction makes it possible that in the end, all have both beneficial mutations. without sexual reproduction, one part of the species has one of the beneficial mutation, and the rest has the other one, and the only way to improve is to wait for another beneficial mutation to come along. so it greatly speeds up the process of evolution. again, inbreeding undermines the mechanism, one gene needs to be able to float around in the entire gene pool of the population. if you have a bunch of inbred families and not much cross-breeding going on, the process is slowed down and the benefit of sexual reproduction is diminished.

you never get a perfectly clean genome, defects get introduced by radiation, by carcinogens, and by retroviruses. the diploid set of chromosomes and sexual production both help adress this issue, inbreeding makes it worse.

but then, in captivity it has been done with lab rats, there are lines that have been inbred for hundreds of generations over many decades in the most extreme way: brother to sister in every single generation. it has no benefit for the rats, and early in the process there are a lot of deformities and health issues. the benefit is that after a few hundred generations, they are basically all genetically identical, which helps in scientific research. real drawbacks are that one infection can eliminate the whole colony, and they all have the same weaknesses. in one line, they all tend to be overweight, they all tend to get diabetes, they all drink alcohol the first time you offer it to them, and they all have the same behavioral quirks. personally i think thats quite messed up. in an evolutionary sense, they stopped evolving, they are like frozen in time. but hey, no need to sequence, you can just download their genome online.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Krynn

I've read up quite
a bit about inbreeding in captivity and the wild, so I hope I can add
to this conversation. Feel free to criticize:

I
think the suggestion that reptiles can tolerate more inbreeding than
mammals is slightly misleading. // Nope,
not misleading at all. Every species behaves slightly differently,
genetics wise. Reptiles especially since they are not all that
closely related to mammals, which are our best model for why
inbreeding is bad. For example, all currently living cheetahs are
very interbred due to a natural bottleneck their species suffered
recently. Ball pythons are NOT cheetahs. Genetically they will
respond to inbreeding differently. The mere fact that many of the
big name breeders have had little trouble producing healthy snakes,
especially snakes with genes that derived from just one or two
imported animals, is telling.// wild animals
inbreed to a small degree without consequence, and almost all animals
have some sort of method for avoiding inbreeding because of the
negative consequences. Most inbreeding avoidance strategies include
kin recognition (being able to tell who your relatives are), and male
dispersal. There are of course a few exceptions to this rule (naked
mole rats, ants and bees are the best examples of this), but I see no
reason to believe that inbreeding does not effect reptiles in the
same way as mammals.

Why is inbreeding bad?

As
you all know, animal populations accumulate mutations. Some
of these mutations are advantageous to the animal, but most of them
are disadvantageous
and decrease the survival of an animal. //Not
true. A genetic mutation comes in three different forms, positive,
negative and NEUTRAL. Neutral mutations are slight differences in a
gene sequence that have absolutely no effect on the organism. These
happen more often than you might think. Also, a negative mutation
may not be so negative. For example, humans carry a gene that is
broken (non-functional) that has to due with muscle development. In
other apes this gene produces the awe-inspring strength gorillas and
chimpanzees have. From a purely evolutionary perspective, this is a
negative mutation, creating humans that are much weaker than their
gorilla or chimpanzee cousins. However this mutation may have put
less pressure on muscle attachment sites to human skulls, allowing
our braincases to expand. So, what appears to be a negative mutation
is in actuality a positive one.// Many genetic
traits work the exact same way as the color and pattern morphs that
we all love. There are dominant traits, co-dominant traits, and
recessive traits. I will give an example of how inbreeding causes
problems, using kinking as an example of a disadvantageous trait.
(Disclaimer: Im not entirely sure that kinking is caused by
inbreeding, but I think it is an entirely possible explanation at
least in some lines. Feel free to substitute kinking in this example
with any other disadvantageous trait you can think of).

---

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OctagonGecko729

I gotta disagree with the "sexual reproduction is to promote genetic diversity".

The way you stated it made me interpret that to be that sexual reproduction arose "in order to do ____". This couldn't be more incorrect and goes against everything we know about natural selection leading to "evolution".

No, sexual reproduction was merely a set of random mutations which proved to be advantageous for those organisms. There isn't a "goal" when it comes to evolution. There is simply a whole lot of random variables that either live and reproduce or die. Sexual reproduction does offer another division which increases genetic diversity within the developing embryo but this really doesn't matter in regards to inbreeding. When sexual reproduction was "selected" for the methodology of reproduction, it simply offers more variables. It doesn't make those variables better then mitotic divisions it only casts the genetic net wider.

If we artificially made a pair of organisms that were perfect but exactly the same. You could inbreed them indefinitely without issue.

Again, the problem with mammals inbreeding is that we diverged very recently in the grand scheme of life on this planet. Insects, reptiles, and micro organisms have been here far longer and have had much more time to get rid of defects. Yes inbreeding can be deleterious for an organism but it can also be beneficial. The exact same is true of very out crossed animals. Either the bad genes align up or they don't.

---

Actually yes, the entire purpose of sexual reproduction is to randomize the genes. When meiosis occurs the organism isn't just splitting the chromosomes in the sex sell, it's randomizing the sequences of the genes as well. This is where a
lot of the genetic mutations happen. On average, each human has about 60 genetic mutations. The entire point of this is to create genetic diversity in the species, or novelty, so that species will have the chance to survive. Natural selection absolutely cannot happen without novelty.

I'm not trying to spam this thread, but my second question still stands. How do keepers keep track of their snake's lineages? Do you assign a number to a particular snake and then keep track of all its offspring, assigning numbers to them too?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Pythonfriend

i do believe reptiles to be somewhat more resilient when it comes to inbreeding. Resilient makes it sound like they have this super genome, they just on average have less gene that causes negative traits then more commonly bred things, like dogs and humans.

that doesnt mean that there wont be any negative consequences at all. also doesn't mean there won't be positive.

if a python has a diverse genome, its immune system will have more solutions to deal with disease. so the immune system is weakened by inbreeding. which means the BP looks completely fine, but the risks that it dies from an infection may be a bit elevated. which is something you dont notice at all, until its too late. Unless the homozygous is the solution or the heterozygous is the problem, you can't make a blanket statement like that.

another thing that happens is that fertility goes down, this is more obvious, and i have heared breeders confirm it. if you do a lot of inbreeding (lets say you are working on a triple recessive), after a while you can notice fertility in the project going down. add new blood and it goes back up. and ignore the breeders producing high fertility line bred animals or ignore the volta region ball pythons? Actually I think the volta region ball python are a great example for a few things said in this thread

so i think genetic health is a real issue. and while you can get away with ignoring it for a generation or two, you should not ignore it completely. You are assuming there are gene that produce negative traits in there. If there are none of those genes, how can there be any issues? It is quite simple, pay attention to your pairings, inbred or not. If there are negative traits, you shouldn't even be breeding the first generation, putting a generation number on it just seems silly.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by OctagonGecko729

I gotta disagree with the "sexual reproduction is to promote genetic diversity".

The way you stated it made me interpret that to be that sexual reproduction arose "in order to do ____". This couldn't be more incorrect and goes against everything we know about natural selection leading to "evolution".

No, sexual reproduction was merely a set of random mutations which proved to be advantageous for those organisms. There isn't a "goal" when it comes to evolution. There is simply a whole lot of random variables that either live and reproduce or die. Sexual reproduction does offer another division which increases genetic diversity within the developing embryo but this really doesn't matter in regards to inbreeding.

---

Completely agree 100% on the wording. Traits dont evolve for a purpose. I disagree on the point that sexual reproduction doesnt matter in regards to inbreeding. Perhaps I dont understand what you are trying to say, but the problem of inbreeding depression is tightly linked with sexual reproduction.

Quote:

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If we artificially made a pair of organisms that were perfect but exactly the same. You could inbreed them indefinitely without issue.

Again, the problem with mammals inbreeding is that we diverged very recently in the grand scheme of life on this planet. Insects, reptiles, and micro organisms have been here far longer and have had much more time to get rid of defects. Yes inbreeding can be deleterious for an organism but it can also be beneficial. The exact same is true of very out crossed animals. Either the bad genes align up or they don't.

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If you just go into google scholar and type "inbreeding depression in reptiles" im sure you would find otherwise. Inbreeding depression is almost universal across the animal kingdom with only few exceptions (and they are not taxanomic exceptions). The only group that I would agree with you about is micro-organisms.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PhoenixGate

Nope,
not misleading at all. Every species behaves slightly differently,
genetics wise. Reptiles especially since they are not all that
closely related to mammals, which are our best model for why
inbreeding is bad. For example, all currently living cheetahs are
very interbred due to a natural bottleneck their species suffered
recently.

---

There are species who are resilient to inbreeding such as the naked mole rat. This has not been demonstrated for ball pythons. There has however, been many examples of inbreeding depression in both reptiles and amphibians. If you have have a good source that suggests otherwise, I would be very interested.

Quote:

---

Not
true. A genetic mutation comes in three different forms, positive,
negative and NEUTRAL. Neutral mutations are slight differences in a
gene sequence that have absolutely no effect on the organism. These
happen more often than you might think.

---

Completely true. These are incredibly common, but I didnt think it was relevant to the explaination.

http://ball-pythons.net/forums/image...quote_icon.png Originally Posted by Pythonfriend http://ball-pythons.net/forums/image...post-right.png
i do believe reptiles to be somewhat more resilient when it comes to inbreeding. Resilient makes it sound like they have this super genome, they just on average have less gene that causes negative traits then more commonly bred things, like dogs and humans.

that doesnt mean that there wont be any negative consequences at all. also doesn't mean there won't be positive.

if a python has a diverse genome, its immune system will have more solutions to deal with disease. so the immune system is weakened by inbreeding. which means the BP looks completely fine, but the risks that it dies from an infection may be a bit elevated. which is something you dont notice at all, until its too late. Unless the homozygous is the solution or the heterozygous is the problem, you can't make a blanket statement like that.

another thing that happens is that fertility goes down, this is more obvious, and i have heared breeders confirm it. if you do a lot of inbreeding (lets say you are working on a triple recessive), after a while you can notice fertility in the project going down. add new blood and it goes back up. and ignore the breeders producing high fertility line bred animals or ignore the volta region ball pythons? Actually I think the volta region ball python are a great example for a few things said in this thread

so i think genetic health is a real issue. and while you can get away with ignoring it for a generation or two, you should not ignore it completely. You are assuming there are gene that produce negative traits in there. If there are none of those genes, how can there be any issues? It is quite simple, pay attention to your pairings, inbred or not. If there are negative traits, you shouldn't even be breeding the first generation, putting a generation number on it just seems silly.

so, you assume that inbreeding can have POSITIVE effects that outweigh the negative consequences, in spite of all the science that says the opposite? heterozygous: one gene can be broken, the individual is still fine. homozygous: either both are broken and you have a dead snake, or both are fine. either you roll two dice, and if you get a one on both, you lose. or you only roll one dice, and the second one is a copy of the first result, and if you get a one, you lose. whats better?

and you assume that having only one set of genes can be better than having two different sets of genes?

and you assume that the BP genome is somehow immune against ionizing radiation, carcinogens, and retroviruses? you must assume that if you want to believe that BPs dont have broken genes in their genome. if you accept that the genome of BPs is just as fragile as the genome of any other species, you have to let go of that false assumption.

and about the number of generations of inbreeding: it gets worse with each generation. and there is no possible project out there that would require more than one or two generations of inbreeding. so thats where i draw the line, 3 generations of inbreeding is excessive, because you can reach the same goal with less inbreeding.


all the assumptions you make, in order to arrive at the conclusion that inbreeding is perfectly fine no matter what, well, these assumptions contradict a lot of scientific knowledge. i could make a bunch of wild assumptions and then arrive at the conclusion that climate change is actually a good thing. i could make a bunch of wild assumptions to arrive at the conclusion that cigarettes are healthy.

i ignore cases where wildly inbred line-bred BPs are still doing fine, because when determining if smoking cigarettes is healthy or not, i also ignore cases of 105-year-old smokers. 105 year old smokers dont get that old because they smoke, and line-bred BPs that are doing fine are not doing fine because of inbreeding. they are the ones that got lucky, in spite of evidence that the risk of bad things happening is elevated, bad things didnt happen.

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Originally Posted by PhoenixGate

I'm not trying to spam this thread, but my second question still stands. How do keepers keep track of their snake's lineages? Do you assign a number to a particular snake and then keep track of all its offspring, assigning numbers to them too?

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you need to keep the data in such a way that anything you can know about the ancestry of each individual is in the system and can be found. so, yes, giving each breeder in your collection a name, or a code that makes it unique, is useful. and then, for each breeder, you compile all the data about ancestry that you have. and now for each egg / hatchling, you just need to know what the parents are, and that gives you all the relevant data.

for an individual horse, it can look like this, and the data reveals, this horse has an inbreeding coefficient of zero:

http://silverbayfarms.com/images/Sas...20Pedigree.gif


and when you breed, you just combine the pedigrees of both parents.

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Originally Posted by PhoenixGate

I'm not trying to spam this thread, but my second question still stands. How do keepers keep track of their snake's lineages? Do you assign a number to a particular snake and then keep track of all its offspring, assigning numbers to them too?

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Sorry for not answering your question. Typically most breeders assign a combination of letters and numbers unique to each individual snake, which will allow them to immediately identify that snake. For example a code may be lp.f.11.5 which would tell me "This is a lesser platinum morph, female, hatched in 2011 out of my 5th clutch of that year". This is just an example, everyone has their own system. would then easily be able to look at your records and identify the lineage of that snake for however many generations have been produced by you.

As far as what kind of information you get from breeders/sellers, it varies a lot. Some breeders sell their snakes with no information at all other then sex, morph, and approximate age. My minimum requirements for any seller I buy from is: accurate sex, accurate genetics, hatch date, feeding and shed data, and pairing that produced the animal. Most people selling any kind of recessive het will also provide some kind of "genetics guarantee" that may include pictures of the parent snakes.

Accurate lineages going back multiple generations is not something that most sellers typically provide in ball pythons, but some other breeders will. Usually ts a fairly high value, rare snake that is also being repersented as a locality specific animal. For example diamond pythons. They have been intergraded with other carpet pythons so much that anyone who truely has pure diamond pythons also has lineages dating back to the locality of the founding stock, and anyone willing to drop the couple grand pure diamonds cost is going to require that lineage be provided


Sent from my SM-G730V using Tapatalk 2

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Originally Posted by Pythonfriend

so, you assume that inbreeding can have POSITIVE effects that outweigh the negative consequences, in spite of all the science that says the opposite? heterozygous: one gene can be broken, the individual is still fine. homozygous: either both are broken and you have a dead snake, or both are fine. either you roll two dice, and if you get a one on both, you lose. or you only roll one dice, and the second one is a copy of the first result, and if you get a one, you lose. whats better?

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I'm not sure which is the case, but you are either using incorrect terminology, or you don't fully understand how genetics work.

You can't have one gene that is "broken" and another gene takes its place. Genes code for specific functions (proteins, hormones, processes, etc). If a gene is "broken", that function is not met. Another gene doesn't take over and make that function work, it just isn't done. For example, if a gene codes for the production of red blood cells, and that gene is "broken", then red blood cells won't be produced (the organism dies if those red blood cells are necessary for life). That doesn't mean there can't be two genes that code for the same function (in this example, if a second gene ALSO codes for the production of red blood cells, then the organism can live, though there could be another affect of having one of those two genes "broken", maybe a lower production of red blood cells instead of no production), but those genes would arise independently, and not to replace one another.

I think what you might be referring to are alleles. In diploid organisms, each gene has 2 alleles. HOWEVER, your terminology is still wrong. There aren't 2 alleles in case one is "broken", there are 2 alleles because there are 2 chromosomes, and those alleles interact with one another depending on whether those alleles are recessive, dominant, incomplete dominant, co-dominant, sex-linked, sex-influenced, etc. You can't have a "broken" one where the other simply takes over the function. That's not how genes, alleles, and organisms work. If something is "broken", then it isn't working the way it is supposed to.

Also, your assumption that heterozygosity is "good" and homozygosity is "bad" is incorrect. It really depends on what gene is involved, what alleles are present, and how those genes and alleles interact with each other and other genes and alleles.

I'll use two examples in humans: sickle cell anemia and blood typing. In the case of sickle cell anemia, it is a recessive gene. If a person inherits 2 sickle cell genes, they have sickle cell anemia, which is a negative trait. HOWEVER heterozygotes for this trait (one sickle cell gene, and one normal gene) are not completely normal, because the trait is not completely recessive. Those heterozygotes still have some sickle cells. This would normally be considered a negative trait (not completely healthy), EXCEPT that's not entirely true. In areas where malaria is common, that sickle cell trait is actually advantageous, thus that negative trait is not truly negative, but can be considered neither, it depends on the environment that individual lives in. The dominant homozygous individuals do not have any sickle cell traits. In this case homozygosity is neither negative nor positive (unless you consider the sickle cell trait negative in all cases, which as I pointed out with malaria is not exactly true), it is a neutral. Homozygous for the dominant allele in this specific example, simply means the person does not have any sickle cells (positive in that the person doesn't have sickle cell anemia, but potentially negative in that they are more susceptible to malaria IF they live in an area where malaria is present, if they don't live in an area where malaria is present, then it doesn't matter).

Now with blood type, there are 3 alleles for the gene coding blood type. One allele, "A" codes for "anti-B" antibodies in the plasma. Another allele, "B" codes for "anti-A" antibodies in the plasma. The third allele, designated "O" codes for both "anti-A" and "anti-B" antibodies in the plasma. The alleles that are inherited determine the individual's blood type. Blood type is neither positive nor negative, and no blood type is more fit than another in a natural world. The only time blood type matters is where a blood transfusion is necessary, and that only matters because you need to transfer the correct type of blood or the person can die (this is a medical procedure separate from the natural world and does not determine any strength or weakness that would matter in the nature). In this case, homozygosity and heterozygosity simply do not matter. These alleles don't code for negative or positive traits, they are neutral.

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and you assume that having only one set of genes can be better than having two different sets of genes?

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All diploid organisms have 2 chromosomes, and each chromosome has a single allele for each gene. All together that means each gene has 2 alleles. Diploid organisms do not have single "sets" of genes, nor multiple "sets" of genes. Each gene is it's own entity. Alleles are the "sets". You can have a single allele (2 alleles are the same), or you can have two different alleles (2 alleles are different). Two identical alleles (homozygous) are not worse off than two different alleles (heterozygous), neither are two different alleles better than two identical alleles. It depends on the trait in question. In some cases homozygosity is positive, in other cases it is negative, and sometimes it is neutral. In some cases heterozygosity is positive, in other cases it is negative, and sometimes it is neutral. You can't make sweeping blanket statements that homozygosity is always bad and heterozygosity is always good.

and you assume that the BP genome is somehow immune against ionizing radiation, carcinogens, and retroviruses? you must assume that if you want to believe that BPs dont have broken genes in their genome. if you accept that the genome of BPs is just as fragile as the genome of any other species, you have to let go of that false assumption.[/quote]

These types of mutations are not necessarily inheritable. If they are not inheritable, then inbreeding is irrelevant. It depends on whether these mutations occur in the germ cells or the somatic cells. If they occur in the somatic cells (in the case of UV radiation, the somatic cells are those most likely to be affected because they are those cells most likely to be exposed to the UV radiation from the sun), they are not inheritable traits. No matter how much inbreeding occurs, those somatic mutations will NEVER be passed on to the offspring. If the mutations occur in the germ cells (as may occur if you aimed a radiation gun at the gonads), then the trait is inheritable and inbreeding can potentially concentrate that mutation such that most or all individuals inherit it.

But again, mutations are not necessarily negative. Some mutations are positive. It all depends on exactly what mutation occurs and how it affects the organism.

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all the assumptions you make, in order to arrive at the conclusion that inbreeding is perfectly fine no matter what, well, these assumptions contradict a lot of scientific knowledge. i could make a bunch of wild assumptions and then arrive at the conclusion that climate change is actually a good thing. i could make a bunch of wild assumptions to arrive at the conclusion that cigarettes are healthy.

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Science doesn't determine inbreeding is good or bad, science determines what happens during inbreeding: genes are concentrated and homozygosity occurs. In WILD populations this is generally considered negative, because homozygosity makes it less likely a species can adapt to a new environment, new predator, new food source, or new pathogen. This is why heterozygosity is considered good in wild populations: more variety means more chance at survival. (By the way, survival is ONLY important to the species, survival of the individual is meaningless.) In captive populations this isn't important, because captive populations are not exposed to the same challenges as wild populations. This does mean a single pathogen can wipe out an entire captive population, but that's why we are also (or should be) careful about quarantine: to prevent the introduction of pathogens. Yes, introduction of a pathogen can still occur, but that doesn't mean more heterozygous captive populations are going to be better off. Depends on what the pathogen is and how susceptible the population is to that pathogen. A single pathogen can wipe out the majority of a captive population regardless how little inbreeding occurred.

As for climate change... that's a strawman argument, but as a conservation wildlife biologist, I'll entertain it for a minute. Climate change is neither negative nor positive to the natural world. To individual species it can be negative, if those species are unable to adapt to the change. It can also be positive, if the species is adapted for the change actually finds an advantage over other species. For example... As the climate gets warmer, polar bears and penguins might die out if they are unable to adapt to the warmer climate. However, other species such as some reptiles may actually thrive because they are adapted and actually do better with a warmer climate. You see... you can't make sweeping generalizations.

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i ignore cases where wildly inbred line-bred BPs are still doing fine, because when determining if smoking cigarettes is healthy or not, i also ignore cases of 105-year-old smokers. 105 year old smokers dont get that old because they smoke, and line-bred BPs that are doing fine are not doing fine because of inbreeding. they are the ones that got lucky, in spite of evidence that the risk of bad things happening is elevated, bad things didnt happen.

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Another strawman argument. Comparing smoking cigarettes and inbreeding or line-breeding ball pythons is like comparing apples to lichens.

i would say when species go extinct, thats negative. science doesnt tell us its negative, i say it is. science is neutral. its up to is to determine if its better when species go extinct, or if its better when species survive. climate change will cause mass extinction, and a conservation biologist should think thats bad.

science doesnt care if more or fewer sick and deformed snakes among the offspring is good or bad. but i say its better to have healthy hatchlings. and then science tells me that inbreeding is bad. when you think getting weakened snakes with a higher chance of genetic defects is perfectly alright, then inbreeding is perfectly alright.

BTW, the homozygous form of sicke cell anemia is lethal, the heterozygous form has the advantage of making the individual resilient against malaria, but it has the disadvantage of shortened life expectancy, a higher chance of blood vessels getting blocked, and lower oxygen transport. but if you only have one copy, at least you are not dead, because you still have one healthy copy of the gene that makes red blood cells.

and no matter how you want to put it, we generally have two healthy copies of each gene. or you could say we generally have each gene two times in two locations, which is the same, at least according to 1 + 1 = 2. if you have two copies of a gene, one can be broken and the other one can be fine. and thats generally fine, well, not in the case of sickle cell anemia, that one sucks even in the heterozygous form. im not following the semantic contortions here. the key point is that it adds redundancy, it allows individuals to survive with one broken copy of a vital gene, because one broken copy leaves them with one copy that is intact. as in 2 - 1 = 1. if each gene is its own entity, it means i have two of each, because the genes sit on the chromosomes, and i have two of each of these. basically you are trying to tell me that 2 = 1, and therefore 2 - 1 can be equal to zero. nope, not buying it.

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Originally Posted by Pythonfriend

i would say when species go extinct, thats negative. science doesnt tell us its negative, i say it is. science is neutral. its up to is to determine if its better when species go extinct, or if its better when species survive. climate change will cause mass extinction, and a conservation biologist should think thats bad.

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Well good thing you aren't the authority! ;)

I haven't given my opinion on the matter one way or the other, but I will say in general conservation biologists have the opinion of whether it is good or bad depending on the organism and where it happens. The extinction of the HIV virus would generally be considered a good thing to any one, no matter who you asked (Unless there was some sick individual who thought HIV infection was a good thing...). The local extinction of the Burmese python in Florida would be considered a good thing by conservation biologists, because Burmese pythons aren't native to Florida and are considered an invasive pest. Mass extinction across the globe is generally thought by the general populations to be a bad thing, but if you start asking individual scientists, you might get different answers. Extinction of one species is what allows other species to thrive. What matters more, in terms of ecology and conservation, is how quickly and how widespread the extinction is occurring, not whether it is occurring at all. Believe it or not, there ARE conservation biologists who believe all of our human efforts to preserve some species are meaningless if that species is unable to adapt to its changing world. Allowing that species to go extinct could mean another species is able to take over that niche, and new species may evolve as a result. In the natural world, these changes occur all the time. What conservation biologists are most concerned about is the affect human activity is having on the natural world, not those processes that naturally occur. Oh and by the way, scientists by and large can't even agree on whether the current climate change is man-made, natural, or natural influenced by human activity. But that's a whole different debate in and of itself.

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science doesnt care if more or fewer sick and deformed snakes among the offspring is good or bad. but i say its better to have healthy hatchlings. and then science tells me that inbreeding is bad. when you think getting weakened snakes with a higher chance of genetic defects is perfectly alright, then inbreeding is perfectly alright.

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Except science doesn't say inbreeding is bad. If healthier animals is better and inbreeding can actually produce healthier animals by eliminating deleterious traits, how can you say inbreeding is always bad? Inbreeding in and of itself doesn't cause illness and weakness, inbreeding simply concentrates those genes already in existence. If there is a deleterious gene in the population, that gene should be eliminated in order to produce stronger individuals. Constant outcrossing doesn't eliminate it, but actually keeps it in the populations by potentially spreading it throughout the population. Now you don't know which animals carry that gene and which ones don't, and it is only a matter of time before the right animals are paired and that trait comes out. By inbreeding, you can concentrate that gene within your population, identify which animals carry the gene, and eliminate them from your population. You then take the healthy surviving animals, continue to breed them to relatives (not necessarily close relatives), and again eliminate those animals carrying the gene. Continue until you have essentially eliminated that deleterious trait, and now you have a healthy line of linebred or inbred animals.

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BTW, the homozygous form of sicke cell anemia is lethal, the heterozygous form has the advantage of making the individual resilient against malaria, but it has the disadvantage of shortened life expectancy, a higher chance of blood vessels getting blocked, and lower oxygen transport. but if you only have one copy, at least you are not dead, because you still have one healthy copy of the gene that makes red blood cells.

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Having that sickle cell trait is better than being dead, but it is also not completely healthy, even though it makes the individual less susceptible to malaria. My point is, you are claiming heterozygosity is better than homozygosity, but in this case it is not.

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and no matter how you want to put it, we generally have two healthy copies of each gene.

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HOw do you know we generally have two "healthy" alleles (I'm assuming you mean allele when you say "copy") for each gene? Have you done genetic typing of all individuals? That is in fact false. There are a myriad of diseases, deformities, syndromes, defects, and weaknesses in the human population, due to the fact we DO carry so many deleterious genes. The same occurs in many captive bred animals who have not been specifically selected to eliminate those deleterious traits.

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or you could say we generally have each gene two times in two locations, which is the same, at least according to 1 + 1 = 2. if you have two copies of a gene, one can be broken and the other one can be fine. and thats generally fine, well, not in the case of sickle cell anemia, that one sucks even in the heterozygous form. im not following the semantic contortions here. the key point is that it adds redundancy, it allows individuals to survive with one broken copy of a vital gene, because one broken copy leaves them with one copy that is intact. as in 2 - 1 = 1. if each gene is its own entity, it means i have two of each, because the genes sit on the chromosomes, and i have two of each of these. basically you are trying to tell me that 2 = 1, and therefore 2 - 1 can be equal to zero. nope, not buying it.

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Actually, no. Diploid organisms have 2 of each chromosome. In humans, that's 23 chromosome pairs, or 46 chromosomes total. Each chromosome has a single allele for a single gene. That means we have 2 alleles for each gene. We don't have 2 copies of the gene, we have 2 alleles for that gene. If we had 2 copies of the gene, that would mean we had 4 chromosomes with 4 alleles. There are no "broken" gene copies. The ONLY exception to this rule is the case of sex chromosomes, where female mammals have 2 X chromosomes and male mammals only have 1 X chromosome and 1 Y chromosome. In this case, one of the 2 X chromosomes in females is deactivated, called the "Barr body". That deactivation is random though, and if a deleterious traits is coded for on one of those two X chromosomes, it can still be expressed. (I presume there is a similar mechanism in other diploid organisms, though I have not specifically researched it.) There are no second copies of genes to take over in case one gene is "broken" as you call it.

I think the problem here is you don't understand basic genetics. There are no "broken" genes, we don't have 4 chromosomes and 2 of every gene. We have 2 chromosomes, each pair of chromosomes has an area for 1 of each gene containing 2 alleles for each gene. In total, that gives us 1 of every gene, and 2 alleles for every gene. The only exception to this rule are where mistakes happen and an organisms inherits the wrong number of chromosomes (in some cases that organisms doesn't survive).

Here's a website with the basics that might be helpful: http://history.nih.gov/exhibits/genetics/sect1a.htm

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Originally Posted by Pythonfriend

and no matter how you want to put it, we generally have two healthy copies of each gene. or you could say we generally have each gene two times in two locations, which is the same, at least according to 1 + 1 = 2. if you have two copies of a gene, one can be broken and the other one can be fine. and thats generally fine, well, not in the case of sickle cell anemia, that one sucks even in the heterozygous form. im not following the semantic contortions here. the key point is that it adds redundancy, it allows individuals to survive with one broken copy of a vital gene, because one broken copy leaves them with one copy that is intact. as in 2 - 1 = 1. if each gene is its own entity, it means i have two of each, because the genes sit on the chromosomes, and i have two of each of these. basically you are trying to tell me that 2 = 1, and therefore 2 - 1 can be equal to zero. nope, not buying it.

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I'm really trying to understand what you are describing without using the proper terminology. If in fact by "genes" you are referring to "alleles", you are still in correct. We don't have two alleles in two locations, we have one allele in two locations, giving two alleles total for each gene. Your math is still wrong, by saying we have each gene "two times in two locations". Two times in two locations isn't 1 + 1 = 2, that's in fact 2 + 2 = 4. We don't have four copies of each gene (or four alleles for each gene), we only have two alleles of each gene.

That said, you are are still incorrect in your assumption that the "good" allele will make up for the "broken" allele. Which by the way I hate the term "broken", because "broken" means it isn't working. A broken allele isn't working. An allele coding for a deleterious trait is still working, it isn't "broken", it just codes for something that isn't good for the organism. That being said, the "healthy" allele isn't necessarily going to be able to make up for the deleterious allele, as is the case with sickle cell anemia. That's only one example, there are hundreds of examples. The only time that deleterious allele would be unable to express itself is if it is a simple complete recessive allele (which although the sickle cell trait is recessive, it is not completely recessive, it is in fact what we can call "incompletely recessive" where it still expresses partially when paired with the dominant allele) paired with a simple complete dominant allele. In which case, the heterozygote would be as healthy as the dominant homozygote (thus homozygosity in and of itself is not "negative" or deleterious, it depends on which version of homozygosity you are looking at). In this case, inbreeding can actually be advantageous by selecting for that dominant homozygote, in which case the deleterious recessive allele would be eliminated from the population.

Here's a simplified example:

Allele Z is a complete dominant and codes for "healthy". Allele z is a complete recessive and codes for "unhealthy".
ZZ = healthy, Zz = healthy carrying the unhealthy trait, zz = unhealthy.

You have 5 unrelated animals in your population. ZZ (#1), Zz (#2), Zz (#3), Zz (#4), and zz (#5). #5 ends up being unhealthy so you eliminate it leaving you with 4 unrelated animals which you can breed together. Each pairing results in only 4 offspring.

#1 x #2 = ZZ (#6), ZZ (#7), Zz (#8), Zz (#9)
#3 x #4 = ZZ (#10), Zz (#11), Zz (#12), zz (#13)

#13 ends up being unhealthy, so you eliminate it. Now realizing you have the deleterious allele in your population, you decide to try some inbreeding to determine which animals carry that trait, and eliminate them from your population, while selecting those individuals who do not produce that trait.

You breed an offspring back to each parent, and breed two siblings together, resulting in the following pairs and resulting offspring:

#6 x #1 (offspring back to parent) = ZZ (#14), ZZ (#15), ZZ (#16), ZZ (#17) -> All healthy. Since you can't see genotypes of these animals, you don't know for sure none of them are carriers of the deleterious trait, but you can continue to work with these animals to determine if they are healthy.

#8 x #2 (offspring back to other parent) = ZZ (#18), Zz (#19), Zz (#20), zz (#21) -> You produced an unhealthy animal which you can eliminate from your population, and you have determined #2 is a carrier of that deleterious trait. You can now eliminate #2 from your population. To be safe, you eliminate all of these offspring and #8 (who must have also been a carrier to produce an unhealthy animal) from your program.

#7 x #9 (full sibling pair) = ZZ (#22), ZZ (#23), Zz (#24), Zz (#25) -> All healthy. Again you can't see the genotype so you don't know which ones are carriers, but since all animals are healthy you can continue working with them.

#10 x #3 (offspring back to parent) = ZZ (#26), ZZ (#27), Zz (#28), Zz (#29) -> All healthy. Again you can't see the genotype so you don't know which ones are carriers, but since all animals are healthy you can continue working with them.

#12 x #4 (offspring back to other parent) = ZZ (#30), Zz (#31), Zz (#32), zz (#33) -> You produced an unhealthy animal which you can eliminate from your population, and you have determined #2 is a carrier of that deleterious trait. You can now eliminate #2 from your population. To be safe, you eliminate all of these offspring and #12 (who must have also been a carrier to produce an unhealthy animal) from your program.

Now you have the following animals to continue working with:
Related Group #1: #1 (ZZ), #6 (ZZ), #7 (ZZ), #9 (Zz), #14(ZZ), #15 (ZZ), #16 (ZZ), #17 (ZZ), #22 (ZZ), #23 (ZZ), #24 (Zz), #25 (Zz)

Related Group #2: #3 (Zz), #10 (ZZ), #26 (ZZ), #27 (ZZ), #28 (Zz), #29 (Zz)

You randomly select 2 pairs from each group to breed back together for another inbred group:

#22 (ZZ) x #14 (ZZ) = #34 (ZZ), #35 (ZZ), #36 (ZZ), #37 (ZZ) -> All healthy. Again you can't see the genotype so you don't know which ones are carriers, but since all animals are healthy you can continue working with them.

#7 (ZZ) x #17 (ZZ) = #38 (ZZ), #39 (ZZ), #40 (ZZ), #41 (ZZ) -> All healthy. Again you can't see the genotype so you don't know which ones are carriers, but since all animals are healthy you can continue working with them.

#28 (Zz) x #3 (Zz) = #42 (ZZ), #43 (Zz), #44 (Zz), #45 (zz) -> You produced an unhealthy animal which you can eliminate from your population, and since #3 is one of your founding animals, you can safely presume that was one of your original carriers of the deleterious trait and eliminate it from your breeding program. To be safe, you can also eliminate all offspring in this group.

#26 (ZZ) x #10 (ZZ) = #46 (ZZ), #47 (ZZ), #48 (ZZ), #49 (ZZ) -> All healthy. Since both parents of this pairing are offspring of your founding carrier, #3, you either just got lucky and had all healthy animals, OR you managed to eliminate the deleterious trait through inbreeding. You can choose to continue working with this group, breeding offspring back to parents and siblings together to try to weed out that deleterious trait. If that deleterious trait doesn't come out, you can safely say you've eliminated it, and have at least 2 safe animals to work with, #26 and #10. You can now outcross this line to bring in other genes, then work with more linebreeding and inbreeding to eliminate any deleterious traits you might introduce in the process of outcrossing.

In this simplified example, you can see how the deleterious trait z was very effectively and quickly eliminated through very close inbreeding. Real life examples are a lot more simple because you are not getting perfect statistical ratios of genotypes, and you are working with multiple traits and polygenic traits, not single traits and single genes. However the application is similar even in real life examples. Through carefully recorded inbreeding and linebreeding, and very strict and careful selection, you can very quickly and effectively isolate and eliminate those deleterious traits from your population. You can also tease out mutations, whether desirable or undesirable, and isolate and eliminate them (if undesirable) from your population or isolate and propogate them (if desirable) in the population. This doesn't mean inbreeding and linebreeding are your only tools to work with when breeding an animal, but they are useful when used properly. You can use a machete to hack off your own arm, or you can use that machete to hack a trail through the forest to a fresh water source in order to survive.

Sorraia,

Yes, sometimes populations can benefit from inbreeding. Naked mole rats are a species like this, and they can in fact suffer from outbreeding depression. This is certainly not a common strategy however.

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By inbreeding, you can concentrate that gene within your population, identify which animals carry the gene, and eliminate them from your population. You then take the healthy surviving animals, continue to breed them to relatives (not necessarily close relatives), and again eliminate those animals carrying the gene. Continue until you have essentially eliminated that deleterious trait, and now you have a healthy line of linebred or inbred animals.

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Do you really think that this describes captive ball pythons? I certainly hope not. Nonetheless, im sure you are aware of all of the problems that have come up in most (although I agree, not all) line bred animals.

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Originally Posted by Krynn

Sorraia,

Yes, sometimes populations can benefit from inbreeding. Naked mole rats are a species like this, and they can in fact suffer from outbreeding depression. This is certainly not a common strategy however.



Do you really think that this describes captive ball pythons? I certainly hope not. Nonetheless, im sure you are aware of all of the problems that have come up in most (although I agree, not all) line bred animals.

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It depends entirely on the population in question, the breeder in question, their record keeping, their selections, etc. I can't speak for all captive ball pythons, I don't know about the health of all captive ball pythons. Within my own personal population of ball pythons, I have only received pedigrees for 2. Pedigrees were not offered for any of my other snakes. That leads me to believe that ball python breeders (at least those I have dealt with) either don't keep these records, or don't share these records. If these records aren't kept or aren't shared, then we really don't know about the status of the captive ball python population in terms of inbreeding, linebreeding, or outcrossing. The animals in question could be any of those, we simply don't know, it is a huge unknown.

I also don't know what kind of health selections ball python breeders make when choosing their pairs. So far the vast majority of discussion I have seen is almost entirely about color morphs and patterns. When talking to breeders, that's almost the only thing talked about. This leads me to believe ball python breeders really aren't that interested in health, but are more interested in color and pattern. I could be wrong, this is only my conclusion based on the discussions I have seen and been involved in. This is also based on the fact written pedigrees are not provided, pedigrees which could provide familial health information if records had been kept and included on those pedigrees. Since no such records have been provided to me, I can only conclude that at least in the animals I have acquired or considered acquiring, breeding for health is not a priority compared to breeding for color and pattern.

That being said, I have a lot of experience when it comes to breeding rats for health and selecting desired traits, and I can speak from my own personal experience and that of others I have worked with that inbreeding and linebreeding are VERY useful tools. In just a few short generations I was able to eliminate many health problems in my population of pet rat, as well as increase their natural life expectancy. Those breeders I worked with who chose to avoid linebreeding and inbreeding had "average" health in their rats. Some would be healthy, some would be very unhealthy, they'd have a few good litters, then suddenly have disaster. It was random, no pattern, none at all. In my rats, because I was able to achieve some homozygosity and consistency through selective and carefully recorded linebreeding and inbreeding, I not only could give reasonable guarantees on my animals, but I also knew what to expect when I made certain pairings.

Will this translate the same way in snakes? I can't say. I don't breed snakes. I don't have experience breeding snakes, and I have not been able to extensively study genetics in snakes. However if what's being said here is true, and snakes are generally more resilient to inbreeding than mammals, then I would feel comfortable saying if rats can be successful inbred and linebreed, then so too could ball pythons.

Also about those problems that have come up within inbred/linebred animals - how many of those problems were already in the population and simply concentrated BECAUSE of the inbreeding/linebreeding? That inbreeding/linebreeding didn't create those problems, it revealed them. The population had issues to begin with that were only brought out by concentrating those genes through breeding close relatives. This doesn't mean linebreeding/inbreeding should always be used for all species, or should be used to great extent, but it CAN be a very helpful tool in selection for or against certain traits.

It is very interesting to me that in these kinds of topics inbreeding/linebreeding seems to only be viewed as helpful to select for specific color mutations. Why is that its only useful application? Why can it not also be used to eliminate undesirable traits, such as poor health? That is exactly how I used it in my rats. I did not use it to select for colors (because the colors i was working with were either so common or were dominant such that I had no need to inbreed in order to produce them), I used it to eliminate undesirable traits, such as poor health.

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By inbreeding, you can concentrate that gene within your population, identify which animals carry the gene, and eliminate them from your population. You then take the healthy surviving animals, continue to breed them to relatives (not necessarily close relatives), and again eliminate those animals carrying the gene. Continue until you have essentially eliminated that deleterious trait, and now you have a healthy line of linebred or inbred animals.

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thats most certainly not being done with BPs.

it means that you start breeding different independent lines, for example 5, and inbreed these 5 lines independent from each other. if you get one defect in one of the lines, you scrap the entire line. meaning the parents, the siblings, the grandparents, everything, the whole line is tossed. and you split the best of the remaining lines, so that you again have 5 lines. for this process, inbreeding is maximized. for the first 10 or 20 generations, you dont get any benefits, you will only be splitting and discarding lines. you will come across all kinds of defects and problems, and each of these is dealt with by discarding the entire line. over time, defects and problems will occur less often, and maybe after around 50 generation you have your final product: a highly inbred, highly homozygous, yet relatively healthy line. they all look the same, and one single outbreeding will ruin everything. unless you want to start completely from scratch, the only way to change the genetics of the line without losing it is now genetic engineering.

last time i checked, in BP breeding, people like to add new morphs into their collection. if you want to use inbreeding to "clean" the genome, thats not possible. the first step is to completely seperate your founding stock from the general population of BPs. you could do it, for example, with super pastels. but it takes decades, and all benefits are lost as soon as you breed any of them to anything else. but the only benefit (apart from being useful in genetic engineering and genetic research) is that you have a bunch of super pastels that you can now inbreed without running into random defects and issues.

attempts to do it in order to produce pretty pets are not going well, at least not in the case of dogs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZMegQH1SPg

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Originally Posted by Pythonfriend

thats most certainly not being done with BPs.

it means that you start breeding different independent lines, for example 5, and inbreed these 5 lines independent from each other. if you get one defect in one of the lines, you scrap the entire line. meaning the parents, the siblings, the grandparents, everything, the whole line is tossed. and you split the best of the remaining lines, so that you again have 5 lines. for this process, inbreeding is maximized. for the first 10 or 20 generations, you dont get any benefits, you will only be splitting and discarding lines. you will come across all kinds of defects and problems, and each of these is dealt with by discarding the entire line. over time, defects and problems will occur less often, and maybe after around 50 generation you have your final product: a highly inbred, highly homozygous, yet relatively healthy line. they all look the same, and one single outbreeding will ruin everything. unless you want to start completely from scratch, the only way to change the genetics of the line without losing it is now genetic engineering.

last time i checked, in BP breeding, people like to add new morphs into their collection. if you want to use inbreeding to "clean" the genome, thats not possible. the first step is to completely seperate your founding stock from the general population of BPs. you could do it, for example, with super pastels. but it takes decades, and all benefits are lost as soon as you breed any of them to anything else. but the only benefit (apart from being useful in genetic engineering and genetic research) is that you have a bunch of super pastels that you can now inbreed without running into random defects and issues.

attempts to do it in order to produce pretty pets are not going well, at least not in the case of dogs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZMegQH1SPg

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That's how it works. Whether or not it is being done is irrelevant, that's how it CAN be done and with good purpose.

Right now, from what I have seen, many breeders generally don't even bother to keep track of their animals. Considering this, we really have NO idea how much inbreeding and linebreeding is actually occurring. Also from what I've seen, very little attention is even paid toward health. As long as the animal is the desired morph, and the breeder can get it to eat a few meals, it is considered "healthy" and encouraged to be entered into the breeding population. I could be wrong, but thus far I have not seen any long-term health records for any animals. We can't really say that our animals really are healthy, unless we keep long-term, life long health records over several generations.

As for what is occurring in dogs - One major problem with dogs: Many breeders are NOT actually selecting for healthy, they are selecting for a number of other traits, and maybe half-heartedly selecting health. If a breeder is truly selecting for health, they would not be breeding any animals with a significant health problem. In dogs this would mean not breeding any dogs with hip, knee, elbow, or other joint issues, not breeding any dogs with eye defects, not breeding any dogs with breathing problems or who can't birth normally, not breeding any dogs with skin issues, not breeding any dogs who can't run and play normally, etc. This simply isn't being done. Show breeders are, in general, selecting for those dogs that win in the shows. They are then breeding together those show winners to get more show winners. Over the generations inbreeding occurs, but with so much emphasis on a particular show conformation (which is often actually detrimental to the dog), those dogs are suffering. IF instead of selecting for a show conformation, these breeders were selecting for health, we would start seeing healthier animals who were not plagued with these kinds of health issues. This isn't a problem with inbreeding, this is a problem with the selections that are occurring. It wouldn't matter if those breeders were inbreeding or outcrossing their animals, the only difference is these problems come out faster with inbreeding. They are still going to occur with outcrossing, which is why we now have so many horribly unhealthy mutts, because the breeds they came from were unhealthy to begin with, even though these dogs are now outcrossed. I personally have yet to meet one single mutt who is healthy. Every mutt I have every known, including those belonging to friends and family members, have been unhealthy in one way or another, ranging from skin issues, allergies, temperamental issues, cancers, hip displaysia, knee and elbow issues, eye issues, to generally poor health. It isn't just an inbreeding problem, it really just comes down to POOR SELECTION from the beginning. If you breed unhealthy animals together, you are going to get unhealthy animals, no matter whether or not those animals are related.

I keep wanting to jump in but your beating me to it Sorraia. Definitely are codifying my position better then I was. :gj:

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Originally Posted by Pythonfriend

so, you assume that inbreeding can have POSITIVE effects that outweigh the negative consequences, in spite of all the science that says the opposite? heterozygous: one gene can be broken, the individual is still fine. homozygous: either both are broken and you have a dead snake, or both are fine. either you roll two dice, and if you get a one on both, you lose. or you only roll one dice, and the second one is a copy of the first result, and if you get a one, you lose. whats better? No I do not assume anything, I observe. I think it has already been covered how this is false.

and you assume that having only one set of genes can be better than having two different sets of genes? The incorrect use of terminology makes this irrelevant to inbreeding. But if you are saying heterozygous vs homozygous, I say you have a toss up chance depending on many variables, I would never assume anything here either

and you assume that the BP genome is somehow immune against ionizing radiation, carcinogens, and retroviruses? you must assume that if you want to believe that BPs dont have broken genes in their genome. if you accept that the genome of BPs is just as fragile as the genome of any other species, you have to let go of that false assumption. Never even implied anything close to this, all I said is they on average have less genes that causes negative traits then more commonly bred things, like dogs and humans. Yes I am assuming this, based on inbred breedings from all 3 species I have heard about and general knowledge on the human genome

and about the number of generations of inbreeding: it gets worse with each generation. and there is no possible project out there that would require more than one or two generations of inbreeding. so thats where i draw the line, 3 generations of inbreeding is excessive, because you can reach the same goal with less inbreeding. I think it has already been covered, but you are assuming it gets only worse, despite accounts of the opposite.


all the assumptions you make, in order to arrive at the conclusion that inbreeding is perfectly fine no matter what, well, these assumptions contradict a lot of scientific knowledge. i could make a bunch of wild assumptions and then arrive at the conclusion that climate change is actually a good thing. i could make a bunch of wild assumptions to arrive at the conclusion that cigarettes are healthy. Are you serious?

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Originally Posted by OhhWatALoser

I see no reason to treat an inbred pairing any different. If issues become common, stop breeding that pair, whether they be brother and sister or 50 generations removed.

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Originally Posted by OhhWatALoser

It is quite simple, pay attention to your pairings, inbred or not. If there are negative traits, you shouldn't even be breeding the first generation, putting a generation number on it just seems silly.

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Yup "no matter what," Don't twist things to attempt to make your point

i ignore cases where wildly inbred line-bred BPs are still doing fine, because when determining if smoking cigarettes is healthy or not, i also ignore cases of 105-year-old smokers. 105 year old smokers dont get that old because they smoke, and line-bred BPs that are doing fine are not doing fine because of inbreeding. they are the ones that got lucky, in spite of evidence that the risk of bad things happening is elevated, bad things didnt happen.
Healthy is a very generalized term and how can you really evaluate it? Obviously if an animal is deformed or dies, it's easy to spot. If any animal has a stronger immune system, how can the average ball python breeder know? You brought up the reduction in fertility, do you say that is unhealthy? So why do you ignore the line bred/inbred animals that are producing higher than average, with no other known aliments? Ignoring the volta region ball pythons, is not ignoring a 105 year old, its ignoring an entire inbred country of smokers that live to 105.

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My point is inbreeding shouldn't be blindly demonized, it should be done responsibly like ALL pairings. It can have a positive outcome and just so nothing is misunderstood, I said can, not always. I also do not imply I am ignorant of the fact that there can be negatives.

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Originally Posted by OhhWatALoser

My point is inbreeding shouldn't be blindly demonized, it should be done responsibly like ALL pairings. It can have a positive outcome and just so nothing is misunderstood, I said can, not always. I also do not imply I am ignorant of the fact that there can be negatives.

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I agree entirely.

To answer the OP's actual question...

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Originally Posted by PhoenixGate

I have a couple of questions. The
first is, how do you as keepers typically maintain genetic diversity
in your collection of snakes (assuming that you breed them) or do you
pay attention to it at all? I know inbreeding happens in order to
prove out a new morph, for example breeding an unusual looking baby
back to its parent. Now, if your maintaining a small colony and
holding back a few babies as future breeders in an effort to save
money on new breeders, or if the baby has a gene that's expensive to
acquire by buying a new snake, at some point a lot of the snakes in
your collection will be related to each other. How does this impact
the snakes, or is there any measurable difference in the health of
closely related captive snakes vs their wild brothers and sisters?

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For me personally, I am not concerned about inbreeding in terms of "good" or "bad". I think inbreeding is just a tool, which can be used poorly, or can be used well. For me personally, I have only received written pedigrees for 2 of my snakes (distantly related), and a verbal pedigree for 2 other snakes (according to this verbal pedigree, those 2 snakes are half-siblings). For my remaining snakes, I have to make assumptions, and I am assuming that if they come from the same breeder, they are in some way related. I have yet to produce my first clutch, though I did pair my first snakes this year (we'll see!!!). The possibility of inbreeding doesn't bother me. I intend to keep records on my snakes. If I see deleterious traits pop up in a particular pairing, that pairing will not be repeated, and depending on how serious that trait is, I might have serious reconsideration about breeding those two snakes ever again, even to different snakes. If its an extremely serious trait, I may not even breed any of the offspring. But if I have success, then I'll have no qualms against breeding those snakes again, or their offspring, to each other or to different and presumed unrelated snakes. I will keep records on my animals, which would include their health and temperament. I won't know the health of any animals I sell, unless the buyer keeps in touch with me and relates to me what happens to their snake (and keep that snake for life so I never lose track of it - let's face it, that doesn't seem to be what happens in this hobby, it appears that a snake can change hands multiple times throughout it's life), but I will at least know the health of the animals in my personal collection, and with that information I'll be able to make the best informed decisions I can for any future pairings I attempt. (Fortunately I also intend to keep my breeding to a minimum, 1 clutch a year, skipping years as needed to sell offspring, because I simply don't have room for too many snakes. This limited number of clutches per year will make it easier for me to keep such records.)

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My second question is this; I have seen
people on this site mention receiving papers with a newly purchased
snake. What do these papers consist of, a pedigree as well as a
feeding chart? How do you guys keep track of the lineage of the
snakes you breed and sell? Or do you keep track of this at all?

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For the most part, I've only received feeding charts. Only 2 snakes came with a recorded pedigree. I intend to keep track of lineage, feeding charts, and other important information, which I will supply to any buyers of my snakes.

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Originally Posted by sorraia

That's how it works. Whether or not it is being done is irrelevant, that's how it CAN be done and with good purpose.

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It is not irrelevant. Perhaps you missed the topic of discussion, but we are specifically talking about genetic diversity in a collection of snakes.

Now just because there are exceptions to the idea that inbreeding TYPICALLY causes problems in animal populations (in captivity and in the wild), does not mean we should ignore the entire concept of inbreeding depression. We are talking about ball python breeding, and sorraia i'm sure you would at least agree with me that the literature on inbreeding does NOT tell us that reptiles and amphibians can inbreed more then mammals can. Most wild and captive animals suffer a loss of fecundity when they are highly inbred.

The lack of selection in the ball python industry seems to be a problem in itself, but I think that could be an independent thread on its own.

I dont think there is a lot of line breeding in ball pythons, but due to the nature of the market I think it would be terrible if it did happen. Most breeders sell their pythons to other breeders, or hobbiests that plan on breeding. If there were line bred animals, their progeny would quickly suffer from outbreeding depression as soon as someone bred them to another line.

Krynn... I hate you for making me read all that. :D

I just wanted to point out, that I think most of us that are arguing are pretty much on the same page. Nobody has said that related snakes should never be paired together because their offspring will have all sorts of defects. I just think that people should be aware of what inbreeding depression is and how it works. That's why I wrote that novel on the first page, but I dont think I did a very good job of explaining it.

BTW sorraia, you clearly understand your genetics and I dont think I have disagreed with any of the science that you have brought up in your posts. I just think that for the most part line breeding is an exception that isnt incredibly relevant for the reptile trade.

Cheers,
-Dylan

To answer the OP's less-discussed question about records received with snakes from breeders:

Out of the 4 snakes I've purchased thus far, only one came with records (which I was glad to receive. The breeder included a spreadsheet with feeding data, birth date, species / locality, a picture to ID my snake, pictures of each of the parents and the source of those parents (the breeder's lines they were from).

If I breed, I will use a similar record format and note birthdate, sex, morph, parents (with pics and known genetics and breeder source), and feeding / shedding information.

I don't think that you would need a specific symbol / labeling format for snakes until you had quite a few, but have on file (in computer or on paper) the information I listed above for each snake and create new files for hatchlings with the same information.

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Originally Posted by Krynn

I dont think there is a lot of line breeding in ball pythons, but due to the nature of the market I think it would be terrible if it did happen. Most breeders sell their pythons to other breeders, or hobbiests that plan on breeding. If there were line bred animals, their progeny would quickly suffer from outbreeding depression as soon as someone bred them to another line.

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I'm not sure outbreeding depression would apply to snakes that were line bred unless they were line bred for an excessive length of time, say 50 generations, during which they may accumulate enough genetic mutations to make them significantly different from the rest of the population. It helps that we're still getting snakes imported from the wild. I would be very interested to see a genetic study of captive snake populations.

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Originally Posted by sorraia

That's how it works. Whether or not it is being done is irrelevant, that's how it CAN be done and with good purpose.

Right now, from what I have seen, many breeders generally don't even bother to keep track of their animals. Considering this, we really have NO idea how much inbreeding and linebreeding is actually occurring. Also from what I've seen, very little attention is even paid toward health. As long as the animal is the desired morph, and the breeder can get it to eat a few meals, it is considered "healthy" and encouraged to be entered into the breeding population. I could be wrong, but thus far I have not seen any long-term health records for any animals. We can't really say that our animals really are healthy, unless we keep long-term, life long health records over several generations.

As for what is occurring in dogs - One major problem with dogs: Many breeders are NOT actually selecting for healthy, they are selecting for a number of other traits, and maybe half-heartedly selecting health. If a breeder is truly selecting for health, they would not be breeding any animals with a significant health problem. In dogs this would mean not breeding any dogs with hip, knee, elbow, or other joint issues, not breeding any dogs with eye defects, not breeding any dogs with breathing problems or who can't birth normally, not breeding any dogs with skin issues, not breeding any dogs who can't run and play normally, etc. This simply isn't being done. Show breeders are, in general, selecting for those dogs that win in the shows. They are then breeding together those show winners to get more show winners. Over the generations inbreeding occurs, but with so much emphasis on a particular show conformation (which is often actually detrimental to the dog), those dogs are suffering. IF instead of selecting for a show conformation, these breeders were selecting for health, we would start seeing healthier animals who were not plagued with these kinds of health issues. This isn't a problem with inbreeding, this is a problem with the selections that are occurring. It wouldn't matter if those breeders were inbreeding or outcrossing their animals, the only difference is these problems come out faster with inbreeding. They are still going to occur with outcrossing, which is why we now have so many horribly unhealthy mutts, because the breeds they came from were unhealthy to begin with, even though these dogs are now outcrossed. I personally have yet to meet one single mutt who is healthy. Every mutt I have every known, including those belonging to friends and family members, have been unhealthy in one way or another, ranging from skin issues, allergies, temperamental issues, cancers, hip displaysia, knee and elbow issues, eye issues, to generally poor health. It isn't just an inbreeding problem, it really just comes down to POOR SELECTION from the beginning. If you breed unhealthy animals together, you are going to get unhealthy animals, no matter whether or not those animals are related.

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This is EXACTLY why I started this thread. There is a lot of emphasis on breeding snakes for a particular paintjob (to borrow Brian at BHB's term) and not a lot of emphasis on breeding for anything else, including health and longevity. I know there was some effort to breed out kinking in caramels, and then ultramels came on the seen and showed no trend to produce kinked animals, which lead ultramels to replace caramels in popularity (correct me if I'm wrong on the details here since it's been some time since I researched this, and I don't have time to do it now). I fully intend to keep records on all the ball pythons I breed in the future, and handing copies of those records to anyone that buys a snake from me.

I have to laugh at this topic. It really doesn't matter in my opinion. People are going to agree to disagree on this topic from now until we are all gone. I personally don't see a problem with it until you see a problem with it......and I also believe it's highly unlikely.

Reptiles are a non-migratory group of animals. I can't really speak for lizards but snakes den and lay eggs in the exact same locations every year if available. I have caught the same red milksnake within a 20' radius four season in a row and twice in the same rock cut. In less than 50' from that milksnake I caught the same copperhead two seasons in a row within a 20-30' radius. Snakes are ambush feeders in general and stay put where there is ample food and shelter.

Inbreeding is responsible for all of the genetic mutations we see in the hobby today. It is how we recognize locale populations such as the various phenotypes of California kings.....Yuma, Coastal, Desert, Long Beach, etc.

If you are still against inbreeding, just talk to some of the guys that keep Graybanded kings for a lesson on locality breeding.....they will teach you all you need to know.lol.

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Originally Posted by Brandon Osborne

.......

Inbreeding is responsible for all of the genetic mutations we see in the hobby today. It is how we recognize locale populations such as the various phenotypes of California kings.....Yuma, Coastal, Desert, Long Beach, etc.

If you are still against inbreeding, just talk to some of the guys that keep Graybanded kings for a lesson on locality breeding.....they will teach you all you need to know.lol.

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thats not true, inbreeding only causes recessives to surface. even in the case of recessives, inbreeding is not what causes the mutation, it merely causes it to surface. in the case of incomplete dominants and dominants, which make up the majority of BP morphs, your statement is clearly and completely wrong. it may be different for corn snakes or king snakes where the majority of morphs are recessives or polygenetic line-bred traits.

i agree that this will always be controversial. so i guess there is only one way to stay away from inbred BPs: you need detailed information about the ancestry, basically a pedigree, so that you can determine how inbred a BP you are considering to buy really is.

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Originally Posted by Pythonfriend

thats not true, inbreeding only causes recessives to surface. even in the case of recessives, inbreeding is not what causes the mutation, it merely causes it to surface. in the case of incomplete dominants and dominants, which make up the majority of BP morphs, your statement is clearly and completely wrong. it may be different for corn snakes or king snakes where the majority of morphs are recessives or polygenetic line-bred traits.

i agree that this will always be controversial. so i guess there is only one way to stay away from inbred BPs: you need detailed information about the ancestry, basically a pedigree, so that you can determine how inbred a BP you are considering to buy really is.

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Step 1: find a funky looking animal
Step 2: breed it to reveal a heritable quality
Step 3: breed the parent and babies together dozens of times


So how is this not a product of inbreeding? There are only a handful of morphs that actually have different 'lines' and even those are not guaranteed to be unrelated.

I'm not quite understanding how morphs are being attributed to inbreeding? The animals are inbred for the first 2-3 generations and then are wildly outcrossed to other mutations. I think youd have a very hard case to make to prove that combos which contain spiders or hypos are inbred now.

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Originally Posted by MrLang

Step 1: find a funky looking animal
Step 2: breed it to reveal a heritable quality
Step 3: breed the parent and babies together dozens of times


So how is this not a product of inbreeding? There are only a handful of morphs that actually have different 'lines' and even those are not guaranteed to be unrelated.

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step 1: find a funky looking animal
step 2: figure out its genetics
step 3: profit

you only need to breed back to prove it out, you only need to hit the 25% chance to get a second visual recessive, or the super form. inbreeding is not what brings a new morph into existence, its just a tool to figure out what you are dealing with, and that needs to be done only once. and when i look at how Brian Barczyk works projects like the scaleless or the sunglow, i see he is doing the exact opposite of your step 3. its about excessive outbreeding to start the new morph with a high level of genetic variety.

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Originally Posted by OctagonGecko729

I'm not quite understanding how morphs are being attributed to inbreeding? The animals are inbred for the first 2-3 generations and then are wildly outcrossed to other mutations. I think youd have a very hard case to make to prove that combos which contain spiders or hypos are inbred now.

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Well let us look at a honeybee... hypo x spider take offspring spider and breed that back to the hypo or take spider het to a het sibling. There is your inbreeding. Then take that honeybee and breed it to a pastel sell offspring. One guy buys a trio to raise and breed. Constant inbreeding no matter what. Inbreeding is a fact of breeding snakes.

Sent from my SGH-T599N using Tapatalk

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Originally Posted by OctagonGecko729

The animals are inbred for the first 2-3 generations and then are wildly outcrossed to other mutations.

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Originally Posted by OctagonGecko729

The animals are inbred for the first 2-3 generations

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Originally Posted by OctagonGecko729

The animals are inbred

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Originally Posted by OctagonGecko729

inbred

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Just sayin'

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Originally Posted by T&C Exotics

Well let us look at a honeybee... hypo x spider take offspring spider and breed that back to the hypo or take spider het to a het sibling. There is your inbreeding. Then take that honeybee and breed it to a pastel sell offspring. One guy buys a trio to raise and breed. Constant inbreeding no matter what. Inbreeding is a fact of breeding snakes.

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i would buy a butterscotch hypo from one breeder, and an orange ghost from a different breeder, and then i buy a spider het hypo and a pewter het hypo from a third breeder.

no inbreeding at all. maybe they were related at one point a few generations ago. but then, with butterscotch x orange ghost, maybe their ancestry is seperate going back all the way to africa. it happens all the time that people make their "extra gene 100% het albino" using an albino they got from one breeder, and their "visual albino with extra gene" using an albino they got from a different breeder.

and none of this applies to dominant and incomplete dominant morphs, which make up the majority of BP breeding projects. where is the inbreeding when i buy a black pastel here, a pinstripe there, and a bamboo from Noah from Ghana, and a calico from someone on craigslist?