Breeding a spider with a severe wobble

[Subdriven]

I agree.. if all breeders do NOT breed spiders that have severe wobble and check the next generation of clutches and only breed the spiders from that clutch that show no or little wobble and keep this going we may end up with spiders that DO NOT wobble.

but if we keep breeding these severe cases we KNOW that that will be passed along to some of the babies, and this keeping the wobbles going!

[Subdriven]

I would like to film my bee eating and film the only sign of wobble IF I can catch it so I can SHOW any potential buyers of my spiders or spider morphs what the father has so there is no question if I'm lieing about the wobble or not. This way any potential buy can know that the parents of there snake is not one like those video's!

[cinderbird]

I agree.. if all breeders do NOT breed spiders that have severe wobble and check the next generation of clutches and only breed the spiders from that clutch that show no or little wobble and keep this going we may end up with spiders that DO NOT wobble.

but if we keep breeding these severe cases we KNOW that that will be passed along to some of the babies, and this keeping the wobbles going!

Except the wobble doesn't work this way. The problem is that the spider gene and whatever causes the wobble are CONNECTED. If you have one, you have the other. There is no option for separation (ie selectively breeding the wobble out).

Breed a "low wobble" female spider to a male pastel, you get some bumblebees and spiders that wobble a lot, possibly going as far as to label them trainwrecks. What do you do with those babies? Keep them? euthanize them? Sell them?

Maybe one of the babies from that scenario is another "low wobble" animal. Its a male. You breed it to 3 females , lets say a normal, a pastel and a pin. You end up with some low wobblers and some medium wobblers and some high wobblers. What do you do with the babies?

There just hasn't been a way to separate the two.

I read a wonderful article, or heard something on reptile radio about how melanin production is linked to neurological disorders. (See also jaguar carpet pythons, like spider balls they have reduced melanin.) I'll see if i can find the article.

[rabernet]

Except the wobble doesn't work this way. The problem is that the spider gene and whatever causes the wobble are CONNECTED. If you have one, you have the other. There is no option for separation (ie selectively breeding the wobble out).

Breed a "low wobble" female spider to a male pastel, you get some bumblebees and spiders that wobble a lot, possibly going as far as to label them trainwrecks. What do you do with those babies? Keep them? euthanize them? Sell them?

Maybe one of the babies from that scenario is another "low wobble" animal. Its a male. You breed it to 3 females , lets say a normal, a pastel and a pin. You end up with some low wobblers and some medium wobblers and some high wobblers. What do you do with the babies?

There just hasn't been a way to separate the two.

I read a wonderful article, or heard something on reptile radio about how melanin production is linked to neurological disorders. (See also jaguar carpet pythons, like spider balls they have reduced melanin.) I'll see if i can find the article.

Exactly - and like I said earlier in this thread - the degree of wobble is as random as the degree of white on a pied.

You can have a low white pied throw high white pieds, and vice versa.

Same with spiders. You can have minimalist wobblers throw train wrecks and train wrecks throw spiders with barely detectable wobbles.

If the wobble could have been selectively bred out of the spider and all spider combos, it would have been done already.

[Serpent_Nirvana]

If the wobble could have been selectively bred out of the spider and all spider combos, it would have been done already.

You think so? After a whopping few dozen generations of breeding at most (probably far fewer in reality, despite the spider being one of the most prolific mutations)? It takes many generations to "fix" a polygenic trait like the genes controlling how much a spider wobbles could potentially be ... Not to mention the fact that AFAIK, no one is really actively trying to breed it out. No one has a breeding program specifically dedicated to trying to eliminate or temper the trait. Somebody may breed one "no-wobble" spider or two, but then they get one or two "train wrecks" out of it, get discouraged and give up.

I am aware that the wobble is either a pleiotropic effect of the spider gene, or so tightly linked that it may as well be. So I do doubt that you can ever get rid of it entirely. But would it be theoretically possible to selectively breed spiders that minimally express the "wobble" part of the spider gene? I think so ... But it sure isn't likely to happen any time soon, maybe ever, especially if conventional wisdom keeps telling people that it's okay to breed "train wrecks" because the gene is "random."

I don't know if this really could work at all ... To my knowledge, "it" (trying to minimize the deleterious effects of a gene by selective breeding) hasn't really been tried before in animal breeding. In most mammal breeds, if you've got a defect, you try and just breed it out and eliminate the bad gene entirely. With spiders, we can't do that, because the bad gene IS the good gene. So if we want the bad to go away, we'd have to work on modifying the other genes that control the "bad" expression.

I think of it like selectively breeding for any other trait ... Take the yellow in pastels. The yellow is a trait inherent to pastels, but clearly there are other genes controlling how much it's expressed. You can select for those genes and breed brighter and brighter pastels over generations ... Or you can say, "Well, I think it's all random" (like I believe was done when the morph was first getting off the ground, in order to sell the ugly ones) and keep getting ugly pastels.

BTW, I hope this post didn't come off as confrontational ... I'm not trying to be argumentative, because this is all speculation. However, I do kind of hope to dissuade people from breeding "train wreck" neuro snakes if possible. It is well and entirely possible that I am wrong, and that the degree of expression of neurologic derangement in spider ball pythons is determined by factors that cannot be selected for or against. However, even if there's the slimmest little chance that I'm right ...... It'd be worth not breeding a "train wreck" and keeping those "bad" modifier genes in circulation.