How many lines of pastel are there? Is there any decent way to tell which line a given pastel stems from?
These days a pastel is just a pastel. A breeder may tell you it is from a certain line but more often than not that is only because it may happen to look more or less like a picture they saw in a book that demonstrated the "standard" for that so-called line.
The mutation we call pastel is the same mutation for all of the known "lines". There are no compatibility issues. So the only real difference we can identify with certainty is that certain animals were produced and sold by certain importers/breeders. They identified characteristics of their animals that allowed them to designate a certain line of pastel. The original males may have come from different parts of Africa or they may have just been combined with females that complemented their physical appearance.
What is also true is that I am aware of no breeders that exercised breeding restraint when it came to a particular line. If there was a pastel that needed to be bred, it was bred. I cannot conjure an example of a breeder who chose to not breed a certain line of pastel in order to preserve is genetic provenance.
Finally, the market is the truest indicator of the pastel line discussion. Go to a trade show. Ninety-five percent (or more) of all pastels sold are labeled "Pastel", nothing more.
Thanks. I had a feeling it was something like that, but I didn't know if only a few imports came over as pastels, in a similar way to how all spiders go back to one spider (or maybe this is just a myth, I'm not sure).
Thanks. I had a feeling it was something like that, but I didn't know if only a few imports came over as pastels, in a similar way to how all spiders go back to one spider (or maybe this is just a myth, I'm not sure).
As far as everyone knows there has only been one spider ever imported and that is where all of our spiders came from.
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Originally Posted by WesleyTF
