Genetic Diversity in a Collection

[Pythonfriend]

That is great when you have quite a bit invest but when you do not like most people you get inbreeding. You can say what you would do but in reality you have done it. Also with what you stated what are you going do for the super bamboo? You can make claims as to what you would do but until you actually do it everything is just empty words.

i guess in that case, if i had a bamboo and wanted a super bamboo and could not afford a second one, i would breed back once.

i never said anything about breeding back once. thats not the issue and with recessives its often necessary. but from there, inbreeding goes down and down and down. lets say i get a male visual recessive that is rare and expensive. the first generation of visuals i produce would be inbred, the second generation not so much, and in the third generation inbreeding will be way down.

i just dont agree with a blanket statement like the one you made earlier:

Constant inbreeding no matter what. Inbreeding is a fact of breeding snakes.

lets take an extreme example. a medium-sized breeder takes out a mortgage to get a male visual sunglow, and needs to work the project hard to have a chance of making back the money. first step would be to breed it to 4 different morph females that are unrelated to each other. now you have a production of hets going, all from the same male but 4 different females. lets call them group 1, group 2, group 3, and group 4. now you raise them up and start pairing het to het, that gives you the first generation of visuals, from half-brother to half-sister breedings. you get visuals from group 1 to group 2, and from group 3 to group 4, and so on. these visuals have an inbreeding coefficient of 12.5%. now you want to breed visual to het, to stop the production of 66% possible hets and get more visuals. so you breed visuals from group 1 to group 2 breedings to 100% hets from group 3 or group 4. more visuals, inbreeding coefficient for each of them: 12.5%.

you keep breeding the original visual to the 4 different females, so you have more of the 100% hets incoming in the 4 groups. and you have visuals from breeding one group to another group, that you can breed to 100% hets from the other two groups. you can just keep going and produce more and more visuals with more and more breeding pairs of visual x 100% het. maximum inbreeding coefficient: 12,5%. and if you breed a visual (from group 1 to group 3) to a visual (from group 2 to group 4), the inbreeding coefficient will again be 12,5%.

but you can also breed one of the 1st generation visuals to other unrelated BPs, and then breed a different one of the 1st generation visuals to the 100% hets. for example, you breed a visual (from group 2 to group 3) to different unrelated morphs, then breed a visual (from group 1 to group 4) to these hets. the visuals you get will have an inbreeding coefficient of 6.25%. now the inbreeding coefficient starts to come down. you never got above 12.5%, and now that you have different visuals out of your own production to choose from, you can reduce the inbreeding coefficient even further.

and all this time other breeders did the same thing, and now you can go to a reptile show and trade a sunglow lesser and a sunglow calico (from your production) for a sunglow banana (with an entirely different story but tracing back to the same line) and the inbreeding coefficient is down to below 1% when you now breed visual to visual. and thats how it is with VPI axanthic or lavender albino or piebald. all the morphs that have been bred into piebald are also outbreedings of the piebald gene to something else. firefly pied, super enchi pied, panda pied, albino pied, lightning pied, sterling pied, spied, lesser pied, hypo pied, dreamsicle, pied clown. their existence means that a whole lot of different genetics has found their way into the recessive project. its well-connected to the gene pool as a whole. and then a new morph comes along, lets say bamboo, fresh genetics from Ghana, been worked with in Ghana, and someone makes a bamboo pied, an even more genes find their way from africa into our multi-gene designer morph projects.

i think inbreeding is low, and for a breeder, its easy to keep it low. people LOVE to try out entirely new world first morph combinations all the time, and that causes genes cross from one project to another, and even from one recessive project to another recessive project, all the time. in addition to new morphs from africa bringing new genes from africa, there is the flood of normal BP hatchlings from africa, and people often use some of them as female breeders or try them out as dinkers. i think the genetic health of captive-bred designer morph BPs is really good, its a really large and diverse gene-pool that is constantly getting new genes from the wild population in africa.

the question this thread asks is: should a breeder try to represent genetic diversity within his/her collection, or is it fine to have a collection where a lot of inbreeding is going on, and it does not matter how much inbreeding you do? i say embrace the diversity and do your best to mix up and recombine the genes, and i dont think that contradicts refining the genes.