Quote Originally Posted by Krynn View Post
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).