Inbreeding depression and selective breeding?

[Krynn]

Great comments guys, i was worried that this might turn in to a violent debate but you guys bring up some great points.

Mosh's balls: Hopefully ill remember this post once im done my final exams for this semester, that is a fascinating topic. I know that national geographic did an article a month or two ago (maybe thats what your link is about) about selective breeding experiments in (red?) foxes. They artificially selected for tame foxes in one population, and agressive mean dogs in another. They are trying to isolate some "domestication genes" in wild animals and they seem to be doing a pretty good job. The domestic population has become puppy dog tame, and the agressive one.. well... i dont think i would be wanting to be the one cleaning their cage

If it wasnt for inbreeding 99% of morphs in the industry would be non existent. Spiders wobble and kinking has nothing to do with inbreeding. Its in their genetics and nothing can be done to stop it. Kinking cane be incubating fault or in their DNA thats passed down

Although i do agree that inbreeding is an important tool to isolate genes, I still maintain that it is done to a much greater extent then needed. I completely agree with you about the spider wobble, as it is only found when the spider gene is expressed so this is likely a case of pleiotropy. As for the wobble, is seems to me that it is most common in recessive mutations (caramel, super cinny) so dont you think its a possibility that kinking itself is due to a recessive deleterious mutation? Lets say for a second its not:
If it "in their DNA thats passed down" then it can be selected against!! The thing that worries me is i have seen plenty of people on youtube with slightly kinked animals who will try to breed them if they can. That seems kind of irresponsible to me.

jmugleston:
Great post! The population has definitely gone through a strong bottleneck, but genetic diversity can still be increased by breeding to "less related" individuals. So even though most BPs in North America are probably related in some way, as far as inbreeding depression is concerned there is less of a reduction in heterozygousity when you breed 3rd cousins for example, then when you breed siblings. Just by looking at all the color mutations that are now out there, you can imagine how much the BP population has evolved since it came to north america.

Here is the problem with the question number 2, since you have referred to Spider breeding twice, do you consider Spider breeding polluting the BP gene pool and therefore lack of selective breeding?
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I can understand why you might begin to believe this after my post; I used the spider gene because it is probably the most talked about deleterious mutation, so it seemed like the most applicable. I want to emphasize that i dont think it is the spider gene that is polluting the gene pool, I think the wobble gene is polluting the gene pool. Sure the two genes may be pleotropic, or they may just be closely linked on the same chromosome.

Regardless, there are spiders that do not have the wobble. Some people on this forum claim there are also some non-spiders that have the wobble from a spider parent. My point is that we can likely select against the wobble, if people steered away from breeding individuals with the wobble. When i get my first spider, it will probably be a long search.

For the most part, I am against inbreeding, but if it is required for a certain project...I prefer to see it go as few generations as possible. I have not seen any proof (backed by facts) that inbreeding has any ill effects on BP's, but my personal ethics tell me not to do it. Just my .02...

Just wanted to mention that there are tens of thousands of studies being done on inbreeding depression, it is quite a hot topic in evolutionary biology. I will admit there has been no studies done on ball pythons in particular, but almost all animals suffer from inbreeding depression. There are a few exceptions (eusocial animals like some ants and bees), but even highly inbred animals like the naked mole rat suffer from inbreeding depression.

The only way to make a population insensitive to inbreeding, is basically wiping all of those deleterious recessive alleles out of the gene pool.