# So why does everyone hate Hybrids?



## that Frog Guy (May 13, 2012)

I am new to Dart Frogs and was just wondering why everyone hates mixing species so much and getting Hybrid Frogs?


----------



## Redhead87xc (Jan 27, 2010)

I am really gonna suggest that you use the search button at the top of the page. This is the most hot water issue to talk about on Dendroboard. I wouldn't mind talking about it, but I am sure that if you type in hybrids, mixing species, breeding different species, you will find the answer you are looking for. Really not trying to be mean. I am just trying to help you avoid any people on here slamming you for asking the question. PM me if you want to discuss the matter further.


----------



## SmackoftheGods (Jan 28, 2009)

Cause hybrids are stupidheads. 

This topic has been discussed to death. I'll echo above, search function will be far more beneficial to you than creating a new thread about it on this issue....


----------



## aberreef (Feb 20, 2012)

Dfs are already pretty enough not to need hybridising. More importantly, most species are protected in the wild with very few exported as pets. It's important to keep them breeding true, otherwise they will be lost to us forever 

There are a few, more experienced keeper on here, who keep more than one species in a viv but I presume these are incapable of hybridising. I can't remember what species these are but have no intention of mixing so no need for me to research

The OP asked a viable question and presumably has no intention of producing hybrids so no need for a slamming


----------



## SmackoftheGods (Jan 28, 2009)

Who's slamming? Have you seen the way these threads usually degenerate?


----------



## aberreef (Feb 20, 2012)

Yup

It was a pre-slamming, be nice statement following Redhead87xc's post


----------



## B-NICE (Jul 15, 2011)

SmackoftheGods said:


> Who's slamming? Have you seen the way these threads usually degenerate?


i doubt this thread will get that much light. A lot of the info on the born is recycled anyway. People leave the hobby and join it on a regular basis, so threads like this should be expected.


----------



## Pumilo (Sep 4, 2010)

How about outbreeding depression? I'm not going to attempt to follow Ed on the subject. Use the search function for Ed's posts on outbreeding depression.


----------



## skylsdale (Sep 16, 2007)

One of the best responses to this issue on here I believe was:



> Hybridization leads to frogs that no longer resemble wild frogs in either appearance or behavior. History in other breeding hobbies has shown that uncontrolled hybridizing creates market forces that lead to the total, or near dissapearance of wild type specimens in the hobby. The very animals that got people interested int he hobby are lost. The culture of the hobby shifts from one of scientific curiousity about nature and natural marvels to one based on profit and ego as people strive to create whatever sells the best or is the most bizzare. This is a fact in many other breeding-based hobbies. Thankfully the PDF hobby is still dominated by people who don't want to see this happen with frogs. We like a hobby that celebrates the amazing characteristics of these animals as nature has forged them rather than what we could transform them into through genetic experiementation.


A few threads worth sifting through:

http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/general-discussion/53381-hybrids-vs-designer-morphs.html

http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/general-discussion/3642-what-problem-hybridization.html

http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/general-discussion/47152-more-waffling-hybridizing.html


----------



## heyduke (Sep 19, 2006)

Basically, very basically, mixing is not beneficial to the health and well being of the frogs. You can search for all the specifics of that.

Hybridizing also is not beneficial to the frogs or the hobby. That can be seen in other reptile hobbies, again you can search for the specifics of that. 

Ultimately if you are known to mix or hybridize you will have a hard time being in the hobby for any amount of time. It's a small "club", relatively, and very focused on the health and well being of the animals we keep. I think most of us feel that we are stewards, caretakers, protectors of these incredibly diverse and unique animals rather than pet owners. 

Definitely take some time, do some research, keep asking questions, get to know others who are in the hobby, and most importantly.. don't rush into your first purchase. 

It's a cool and rewarding hobby with a wonderful mélange of dedicated and passionate individuals. We need a pdf statue of liberty... me thinks.


----------



## chuckpowell (May 12, 2004)

Not everyone hates hybrids but there is a rabid group here who do. Most of the reasons given for not wanting/liking hybrids don't hold up. 

<i>Hybridization leads to frogs that no longer resemble wild frogs in either appearance or behavior. History in other breeding hobbies has shown that uncontrolled hybridizing creates market forces that lead to the total, or near dissapearance of wild type specimens in the hobby. The very animals that got people interested int he hobby are lost. The culture of the hobby shifts from one of scientific curiousity about nature and natural marvels to one based on profit and ego as people strive to create whatever sells the best or is the most bizzare. This is a fact in many other breeding-based hobbies. Thankfully the PDF hobby is still dominated by people who don't want to see this happen with frogs. We like a hobby that celebrates the amazing characteristics of these animals as nature has forged them rather than what we could transform them into through genetic experiementation.</i>

The frogs we not keep in our tanks no longer resemble wild frogs either - overall their smaller, less colorful and many of them are being breed for specific colors or patters. We've changed their appearance and how they behave. The animals that got us interested in the hobby are not necessarily the frogs that keep us in the hobby. How many people after getting what they want, then want the next best thing, the new thing. The nature of the hobby has always been "man those things are beautiful!" Scientific interest has always comes second. The profit motive is something else and those people will always be around and we have to deal with them. But that's not what encourages the hobbyist to keep our animals. 

This is not all to say that hybrids are a good things. Their just a thing - not good or bad. If someone likes them and want to keep them - that should be fine in our hobby. If they don't - that should be fine also. 

I know what some of you are going to say, but marketing of these animals is another matter entirely. Know and trust the person you get your frogs from. I've been around for a few years now and there are a number of people who I will never deal with again and some that I no problem dealing with. I figure the ones the rip me off - that's there problem. They could have done so much better with me by being honest. 

Best,

Chuck


----------



## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

aberreef said:


> The OP asked a viable question and presumably has no intention of producing hybrids so no need for a slamming


Hmm, let's look at the phrasing of the OP... he asked why hybrids are hated.. which indicates that he has at least read one of the threads on it. This then begs the question of why he needed to restart the argument. 

Ed


----------



## skylsdale (Sep 16, 2007)

chuckpowell said:


> Not everyone hates hybrids but there is a rabid group here who do. Most of the reasons given for not wanting/liking hybrids don't hold up.
> 
> The frogs we not keep in our tanks no longer resemble wild frogs either - overall their smaller, less colorful and many of them are being breed for specific colors or patters. We've changed their appearance and how they behave. The animals that got us interested in the hobby are not necessarily the frogs that keep us in the hobby. How many people after getting what they want, then want the next best thing, the new thing. The nature of the hobby has always been "man those things are beautiful!" Scientific interest has always comes second. The profit motive is something else and those people will always be around and we have to deal with them. But that's not what encourages the hobbyist to keep our animals.


But this is an 'apples to oranges' comparison. Having a tricolor that doesn't quite have the same intense coloration as its wild counterpart, or maybe comes to the front of the tank for feeding, isn't the same as crossing D. leucomelas with D. auratus. At that point you've created a fundamentally different creature. This would be true hybridizing.

Crossing an Azureus with a Cobalt would be outcrossing (mixing different populations) and is still a different thing than a frog that isn't quite up to par with with wild counterparts. Granted, it's not quite the same...but I think crossing/hybridizing is still a number of degrees removed from at least attempting to keep them as close to wild type animals as possible. Obviously they have been removed from the pressure and selection in the wild and we can never replicate that perfectly...but attempting to do so is still a very different thing than purposely selecting for specific traits and breeding for 'designed' product, or crossing animals to create something no one else has (and you can demand top dollar for), etc.


----------



## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

chuckpowell said:


> Not everyone hates hybrids but there is a rabid group here who do. Most of the reasons given for not wanting/liking hybrids don't hold up.....
> 
> ......The frogs we not keep in our tanks no longer resemble wild frogs either - overall their smaller, less colorful and many of them are being breed for specific colors or patters. We've changed their appearance and how they behave. The animals that got us interested in the hobby are not necessarily the frogs that keep us in the hobby


The implication here is that the frogs have been irreversiably changed and not for the better. We do not know this to be a fact at this time since many of the changes (other than selective breeding for color) are probably artifacts from how the frogs are kept. Phenotypical plasticity has been demonstrated in a wide number of taxa including anurans so we would have to rule that out as a potential cause. We know in multiple taxa that fat reserves and enviromental conditions trigger reproduction, and that once triggered the metabolism shifts from one of growth to one of reproduction which effectively halts further growth during the breeding season (which in the captive frogs in virtually all collections is 24/7/365) which would result in smaller adult frogs (since wild populations breed for very short periods of time (see for example the time spent breeding here http://www.revistasusp.sibi.usp.br/pdf/philo/v9n1/v9n1a02.pdf ). With respect to the coloration, we already know that metabolic demand for carotenoids is greater than once thought, that carotenoids are diverted from the skin to other metabolic demands (including egg provisioning) and that the diets we tend to use are depauperate in the diversity of carotenoids needed for the frogs to have maximal coloration. The year round artificial breeding cycles put demands on these carotenoids far in excess of what is typically seen in wild populations..... 




chuckpowell said:


> This is not all to say that hybrids are a good things. Their just a thing - not good or bad. If someone likes them and want to keep them - that should be fine in our hobby. If they don't - that should be fine also
> 
> I know what some of you are going to say, but marketing of these animals is another matter entirely. Know and trust the person you get your frogs from. I've been around for a few years now and there are a number of people who I will never deal with again and some that I no problem dealing with. I figure the ones the rip me off - that's there problem. They could have done so much better with me by being honest.


One of the major problems that has been passed over are the endless threads where a frog is photographed and a debate is started over what kind of frog it is based solely on it's phenotype. The end result is that the frog is assigned into a group and then bred and offspring distributed (or the frog itself is resold as X). This puts a wider population at risk of outbreeding depression particularly given the fact that many of the populations of frogs are unlikely to see new founders to help sustain the genetic diversity. If there was more participation in a registry (like TWI or even FrogTrax) then hybrids wouldn't be the risk that they currently pose to sustaining the hobby.... Other animal hobbies have required a continual input of wild caught animals to sustain the populations and supply the need for non-hybridized animals which is a luxury that is impossible for some populations and potentially high risk for others. 

The risk from hybrids depends on two factors 
1) the honesty of the buyer and seller 
2) diligence on the part of the greater hobby to prevent outcrossings by tracking degrees of relatedness. 

It would be very easy to mix a hybrid into an established line and the hobby shows very little interest in tracking so paranoia is the only option left, which is a sad state of affairs..... 

Ed


----------



## frogparty (Dec 27, 2007)

I dont hate hybrids, its not their fault...

I hate trolls


----------



## skanderson (Aug 25, 2011)

i would say the answer is a cultural one. not meaning the frogs culture, but the culture of the dart community. as someone who has more orchids that frogs i find the there are plenty of natural types available to be a logically inconsistent arguement. there is much more variability in orchids than in dart frogs, yet orchid hybridization is a massive business. also even though there are thousands and thousands of orchid hybrids, straight species still have their fans. i think that there are more people in the orchid hobby because of hybrids and that the species are still kept by those who would keep them whether or not there were/are hybrids available. just my random musings on the subject no insult intended to anyone who has an opposing opinion, and in case you are wondering i am not now, nor do i intend to start up a dart frog hybridizing program.


----------



## illinoisfrogs (Apr 16, 2010)

skanderson said:


> i would say the answer is a cultural one. not meaning the frogs culture, but the culture of the dart community. as someone who has more orchids that frogs i find the there are plenty of natural types available to be a logically inconsistent arguement. there is much more variability in orchids than in dart frogs, yet orchid hybridization is a massive business. also even though there are thousands and thousands of orchid hybrids, straight species still have their fans. i think that there are more people in the orchid hobby because of hybrids and that the species are still kept by those who would keep them whether or not there were/are hybrids available. just my random musings on the subject no insult intended to anyone who has an opposing opinion, and in case you are wondering i am not now, nor do i intend to start up a dart frog hybridizing program.


Very interesting point, thanks!


----------



## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

skanderson said:


> i would say the answer is a cultural one. not meaning the frogs culture, but the culture of the dart community. as someone who has more orchids that frogs i find the there are plenty of natural types available to be a logically inconsistent arguement. there is much more variability in orchids than in dart frogs, yet orchid hybridization is a massive business. also even though there are thousands and thousands of orchid hybrids, straight species still have their fans. i think


 
There are significant differences between the risks to the sustainability of the population.. If for example an orchid species gets contaminated with hybrids and demonstrates outbreeding issues, the orchids can still be propegated vegetatively or through meristem cloning. Hobbyists cannot propegate the frogs in either method... So let's look at a hypothetical example, outbreeding depression (which can occur with a hybrid or between two localities) can take as long as 5 generations from the cross for the negative impacts of the original cross to become apparent. Hybrids get mixed into line X and after 3 generations (which could be between 3 and 6 years later), the later generations begin to crash and do not produce replacements. The population of frogs would probably be lost. 

The hobby has already lost at least one "morph" of frogs due simply to popularity cycles.. adding additional threats reduces the security of the populations..... 

Ed


----------



## chuckpowell (May 12, 2004)

Interesting points Ed, but lets concentrate on the ones in the paragraph below for the moment. If we don't judge the frogs on their phenotype (looks) then how do we, as hobbyist, judge them? I had a friend who went down and collected frogs from with an importer and brought his own frogs back. They would be considered a single importation of a single D. tinctorius variety, but they were collected over a vast area over many weeks and showed limited variabilty. Does this represent a population - frogs from over an areas dozens of miles (many dozens to hundreds of miles away you've find a different morph) away from each other were collected and mixed together. How do we as hobbyists decide what is a population with any certainty, expect by how they look? 

Then a registry - I tried to get one started maybe 20 years ago - no interest, and there is still little interest today. Why? I don't know, but there is a reason and if we don't figure out what it is and correct it we'll be in this same place in another 20 years. 

Best,

Chuck



Ed said:


> One of the major problems that has been passed over are the endless threads where a frog is photographed and a debate is started over what kind of frog it is based solely on it's phenotype. The end result is that the frog is assigned into a group and then bred and offspring distributed (or the frog itself is resold as X). This puts a wider population at risk of outbreeding depression particularly given the fact that many of the populations of frogs are unlikely to see new founders to help sustain the genetic diversity. If there was more participation in a registry (like TWI or even FrogTrax) then hybrids wouldn't be the risk that they currently pose to sustaining the hobby.... Other animal hobbies have required a continual input of wild caught animals to sustain the populations and supply the need for non-hybridized animals which is a luxury that is impossible for some populations and potentially high risk for others.


----------



## chuckpowell (May 12, 2004)

Ed,

I think this is a judgement made by a lot of people and I'm not certain its correct, that these change are changing "...not for the better." Since we have limited room for our frogs maybe a smaller size is fine, maybe a less colorful frog is fine. They may not have the iridescence of many wild collected frogs, but their are still outstandingly beautiful. Maybe that OK. 

This hobby is becoming stuck in a box. We say, quite forcefully sometimes, that this is the way something is suppose to be and that's that. We need to start questioning those assumption and maybe, arrive at new ones. I think our frogs (when produced by good, dedicated hobbyists = good quality frogs) are fine the way they are. 

Best,

Chuck



Ed said:


> The implication here is that the frogs have been irreversiably changed and not for the better.


----------



## billschwinn (Dec 17, 2008)

Ed said:


> There are significant differences between the risks to the sustainability of the population.. If for example an orchid species gets contaminated with hybrids and demonstrates outbreeding issues, the orchids can still be propegated vegetatively or through meristem cloning. Hobbyists cannot propegate the frogs in either method... So let's look at a hypothetical example, outbreeding depression (which can occur with a hybrid or between two localities) can take as long as 5 generations from the cross for the negative impacts of the original cross to become apparent. Hybrids get mixed into line X and after 3 generations (which could be between 3 and 6 years later), the later generations begin to crash and do not produce replacements. The population of frogs would probably be lost.
> 
> The hobby has already lost at least one "morph" of frogs due simply to popularity cycles.. adding additional threats reduces the security of the populations.....
> 
> Ed


ED, which one have we lost?


----------



## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

If I remember correctly in the US we have lost the "Giron Valley" morph of E. tricolor... 

There are a number of species lost in Europe (see this old thread...http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/sc...-trends-danger-species-loss-2.html#post309832) 


Ed


----------



## kitcolebay (Apr 7, 2012)

First and foremost, I apologize beforehand before posing a question. I'm still new to the hobby(a few months). I'm still learning a lot everyday by reading more and more on these forums, other sites, and talking to people. I've read quite a bit on the subject of mixing. I have no plans or intentions of mixing. I am a proud new owner of 6 beautiful young leucs. 
The question is, if someone does want to "safely" mix without leading to hybrids, is it feasible to do a same sex community? Has someone already done this successfully or unsuccessfully? 
Once again, I apologize if this is the wrong place for the question or if it is another topic that has been conversed over too many times. I haven't stumbled over this question when reading the other threads and didn't have anything pop up on the search. 
Thanks, Chris.


----------



## that Frog Guy (May 13, 2012)

I see now and I respect everyone's wish to not change what is in the wild.

I was just curious as I have never seen people get upset over any other type of animal Hybridation. For Instance Pythons. I was at a show where one dealer had the whole back wall and all the pythons were some type of hybrid (500-2,000 each). While regular Pythin babies could be bought for 20.00 I have even seen one Python Hybrid being sold for 40,000 and have never seen anyone upset over these snakes.

It's cool that the people here are unique and want to keep it as nature intended. I was not thinking about doing Hybrids I was just curious. I hope that I did not offend to many people.


----------



## aberreef (Feb 20, 2012)

that Frog Guy said:


> I see now and I respect everyone's wish to not change what is in the wild.
> 
> I was just curious as I have never seen people get upset over any other type of animal Hybridation. For Instance Pythons. I was at a show where one dealer had the whole back wall and all the pythons were some type of hybrid (500-2,000 each). While regular Pythin babies could be bought for 20.00 I have even seen one Python Hybrid being sold for 40,000 and have never seen anyone upset over these snakes.
> 
> It's cool that the people here are unique and want to keep it as nature intended. I was not thinking about doing Hybrids I was just curious. I hope that I did not offend to many people.


Ball pythons are slightly different to df's. The colours you see are due to various recessive, co-dominant or dominant genes which are present in wild snakes. They could potantially be produced naturally in the wild - they just wouldn't last very long lol. 'Wild type balls are a little drab too so keepers need to muck about with selective breeding to brighten them up a bit

More importantly there are WAY more snakes in the hobby than frogs. Therefore, there is little chance of losing the wild type (present in almost every clutch). If you cross 2 Tinc morphs then, as far as I'm aware, all the offspring will be the same and the original phenotype will be lost from this line.

Who knows though, in the future we may have no choice other than to cross morphs due to too small a gene pool of the wild type frog in the hobby

Crossing 2 different species of any animal is a whole different situation that ofter leads to sterile offspring. Personally, I don't see the point. It takes just as much effort as producing natural offspring


----------



## heckler (Dec 28, 2011)

Just curious, but outside of inter-species breeding, shouldn't different color morphs be capable of successful breeding? I understand that the whole idea is to not lose naturally occurring color morphs, but, for example, shouldn't differing morphs of imitators be able to successfully breed, and the resulting frog would still be an imitator?


----------



## motydesign (Feb 27, 2011)

you def used an appropriate user name. 

that aside, using Eds link
http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/science-conservation/34751-frog-trends-danger-species-loss.html
then compounding it with hybrids, youll loose everything we worked for.... simple enough.


----------



## ShelbyFFS (Apr 30, 2012)

<quote>There are significant differences between the risks to the sustainability of the population.. If for example an orchid species gets contaminated with hybrids and demonstrates outbreeding issues, the orchids can still be propegated vegetatively or through meristem cloning.</quote>

Isn't there that guy cloning headless frogs? I saw a video about it once.


----------



## skanderson (Aug 25, 2011)

as a quick response not all orchids are or can me meristem cloned either. so that is not a full explanation to the huge difference in the community. i dabble in reef tanks, planted freshwater tanks, orchids, dart frogs, day geckos, dwarf conifers, hostas, carnivorous plants, martial arts, and combat shooting. each of these activities has websites that i visit. there is alot of crossover between many of my interests and the people who are on these boards. that being said each community is unique in how issues are raised and responded to. i have a friend who is doing much less work with and posting on conifers in favor of hostas. his reason is that the conifer community is full of "experts" who may or may not know what they are talking about but feel free to ream anyone who has an opinion that varies from their own. if we want to have a successful group of keepers and grow our hobby we should be very careful of the tone of discussions and be sure that opinion is not used as fact in condemning people with opposing opinions.


----------



## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

chuckpowell said:


> Interesting points Ed, but lets concentrate on the ones in the paragraph below for the moment. If we don't judge the frogs on their phenotype (looks) then how do we, as hobbyist, judge them? I had a friend who went down and collected frogs from with an importer and brought his own frogs back. They would be considered a single importation of a single D. tinctorius variety, but they were collected over a vast area over many weeks and showed limited variabilty. Does this represent a population - frogs from over an areas dozens of miles (many dozens to hundreds of miles away you've find a different morph) away from each other were collected and mixed together. How do we as hobbyists decide what is a population with any certainty, expect by how they look?
> 
> Then a registry - I tried to get one started maybe 20 years ago - no interest, and there is still little interest today. Why? I don't know, but there is a reason and if we don't figure out what it is and correct it we'll be in this same place in another 20 years.


Hi Chuck, 

Starting with the population discussion.. It is absolutely a population. In conservation/ecology it is referred to as a metapopulation provided that they are actually all the same species and not a complex of several cryptic species. However the fact that they were collected in multiple locations and looked similar doesn't provide us with any other information of real value other than crossing the different animals could result in real failure over several years since we know in anurans that outbreeding within a species can reduce survivial of the offspring (see for example http://www.environmental-expert.com/Files\6063\articles\5372\LV68M29432114864.pdf)..... 

So the question really becomes how do we as hobbyists apply that idea to a group of frogs that look the same and came in from the same shipment... It depends on the goal of the hobby with respect to those frogs. In general, the best the hobby can do at this time is to keep similar looking frogs that lack collection data, that come in at the same time as thier own population whether or not they are from the same population in the wild or not. This is the conservative method that buys time until genetic fingerprinting can be done to determine whether frogs from different imports are from the same population and thus should be bred to one another or not. However the amount of time this behavior on the part of hobbyists buys us comes at a loss of genetic diversity due to relaxed selection (pairing frogs based on intensity of color/pattern is one example), and enhanced genetic drift. The loss of genetic diversity at some point is going to result in frogs that have difficulties in some manner which will push the captive population to extinction.... Right now, we have gotten away to some extent by long-term people who maintain thier personal collections for the lives of the individual frogs and the occasional new(er) genetics from either legal or illegal imports. 

As for the registry, in twenty years if nothing changes, we could be looking at a list of frogs lost to the hobby. It has happened in other hobbies (for example annual killifish)... and I suspect it will occur in our hobby as well. 

Some thoughts,

Ed


----------



## frogparty (Dec 27, 2007)

skanderson said:


> as a quick response not all orchids are or can me meristem cloned either. so that is not a full explanation to the huge difference in the community. i dabble in reef tanks, planted freshwater tanks, orchids, dart frogs, day geckos, dwarf conifers, hostas, carnivorous plants, martial arts, and combat shooting. each of these activities has websites that i visit. there is alot of crossover between many of my interests and the people who are on these boards. that being said each community is unique in how issues are raised and responded to. i have a friend who is doing much less work with and posting on conifers in favor of hostas. his reason is that the conifer community is full of "experts" who may or may not know what they are talking about but feel free to ream anyone who has an opinion that varies from their own. if we want to have a successful group of keepers and grow our hobby we should be very careful of the tone of discussions and be sure that opinion is not used as fact in condemning people with opposing opinions.


you can still clone them vegetatively...you can't clone your frogs


----------



## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

chuckpowell said:


> Ed,
> 
> I think this is a judgement made by a lot of people and I'm not certain its correct, that these change are changing "...not for the better." Since we have limited room for our frogs maybe a smaller size is fine, maybe a less colorful frog is fine. They may not have the iridescence of many wild collected frogs, but their are still outstandingly beautiful. Maybe that OK.


The small size of the enclosure shouldn't be the factor that determines the adult size of the frog (since many other taxa do not behave in this manner)... We need to look at what are considered the enviromental factors that are accepted as "good care" for the frogs. I've touched on these elsewhere multiple times.. but a short list would look something like this (not all enclusive or definitive, example only). 
1) fat frogs (fat frogs look healthy...)
2) breeding conditons 24/7/365
3) enclosures designed for aesthetics over function
4) over planting (insufficient open space for "terrestrial species")
5) reduced calorie metabolization due to being kept at lower temperatures 70-75 F, when we know that the frogs are exposed to much higher temperatures in the wild).... 



chuckpowell said:


> This hobby is becoming stuck in a box. We say, quite forcefully sometimes, that this is the way something is suppose to be and that's that. We need to start questioning those assumption and maybe, arrive at new ones. I think our frogs (when produced by good, dedicated hobbyists = good quality frogs) are fine the way they are.


One of the main reasons the hobby is becoming stuck in a box is because there is an overwhelming reliance on "recipes for success" and continual reinforcement of dogma through the use of those recipes and what people think is correct (without any corroborating evidence) without even looking at what worked in the past in the hobby..... The whole trend in recommendations for "good starter or beginner frogs" is an example of dogma that is self reinforced by the hobby... Years ago, there was a much wider range of "starter" frogs that were often recommended to people getting started... now the overwhelming recommendations are for leucomelas...and people will recommend against species like tinctorius or even truncatus without a reason other than they started with leucomelas.... 
There is an entire list of unsupported dogma that is floating around the hobby being continually reinforced.. (like disinfecting leaves, logs, etc..). 

Enough of a rant... 

Ed


----------



## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

skanderson said:


> as a quick response not all orchids are or can me meristem cloned either.


Paphiopedilums and related taxa are typically considered to be unable to be cloned by the hobby but a review of the literature shows that considerable advances have been made for this genus in the last decade or so (see for example ScienceDirect.com - Scientia Horticulturae - Paphiopedilum cloning in vitro.... If you search google patents, you can even find methods for cloning Paphiopedilums registered as proprietary... 

Ed


----------



## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

aberreef said:


> Who knows though, in the future we may have no choice other than to cross morphs due to too small a gene pool of the wild type frog in the hobby


If it comes down to this, then the hobby will have failed the population. A population can be salvaged with relatively few animals (and has been done with some critically endangered species) but it would require the hobby to undertake genetic management. 
Effectively due to the risks, outcrossing is considered the action of last resort and should only be undertaken when the population is guaranteed to go extinct since the act of outcrossing could cause the population to go extinct on it's own (outbreeding depression). 

Ed


----------



## Boondoggle (Dec 9, 2007)

that Frog Guy said:


> I was just curious as I have never seen people get upset over any other type of animal Hybridation. For Instance Pythons. I was at a show where one dealer had the whole back wall and all the pythons were some type of hybrid (500-2,000 each). While regular Pythin babies could be bought for 20.00 I have even seen one Python Hybrid being sold for 40,000 and have never seen anyone upset over these snakes.


As a former breeder of "investment quality" reptiles (ugh) I have a few thoughts. A relatively small minority in the snake community (some boa breeders come to mind) are very upset with the current situation, and work very hard to breed location specific animals. Unfortunately that is very hard to do because with the designer morphs being so prevalent, you have to be very careful about your founder stock. Those $20 babies you are seeing are not eligible because no matter how they appear, I guarantee that they are just "possible hets" from other designer breeding projects, meaning they may carry the "gene of the month", but it's in it's recessive form. If you bought ten of those and bred them together for a decade, you would end up with all kinds of different designer morphs. I don't know of any ball python breeders that are purposefully breeding a wild type ball. So how does that situation end? Think about the person that spends $40,000 (or heck, $2000) on a snake. They are not buying that animal out of scientific curiosity, etc. They are making a financial investment that they need to get a return on. As that snake becomes more popular the market for it booms, then eventually busts as demand is dwarfed by supply. Even if the species survives the "bust" cycle in captivity it cuts back on the pool of genetics available to that line in captivity, which causes problems later. 

Even though it's a different situation (morphs vs. hybrids) some of the same lessons can be applied. Look where the corn snake market is. Look at the eventual situation the ball python market will reach. Most people in the PDF community want to avoid that situation and that's why many hobbyists knee jerk reaction is to cry "Fowl" at the mention of hybrids.


----------



## Jellyman (Mar 6, 2006)

I enjoy my mixed tanks, my species only tanks, and have several hybrids in my collection. Most of my hybrids are from my own frogs but I have three that I have purchased or received from other dendro members. You can use the search function or send me a PM if you want any more details. I no longer participate in forum discussion but I always have time to converse via PM with anyone who has questions.


----------



## BrianWI (Feb 4, 2012)

As I have said before, the problem isn't the breeding method; it is generally the breeding motive that makes poor animals. Done right, the "issues" some push are just not issues at all.

Do I think people should hybridize dart frogs to make newer pretty ones? No, not really. Do believe it has to wreck the hobby? No. Would it give possible insights to the genetic make up and differences among morphs? Absolutely.

Finally, as I have said before, they are just pets anyway, can never be released, and hence are irrelevant to the wild populations anyway.

Best option? Just be reasonable in your breedings, enjoy your pets, and do right by their health and ability to be comfortable in captivity.


----------

