Breeding a spider with a severe wobble

[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.