# bloodline crossing



## Rain_Frog (Apr 27, 2004)

Is it ok to cross bloodlines? I have a WC group of Mantella ebenaui, and I have two CB mantella ebenaui from Mark Pepper. I'm pretty sure they're unrelated, but I can never be certain.

If I can cross the bloodlines, am I supposed to label them F1s?


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## housevibe7 (Sep 24, 2006)

This is one of those topics Doug that are almost like hybrids to some people... It REALLY depends on whom you ask. There are two parties, lumpers and splitters, so a lot really depends on if they are proven to be the same population or possibly different pops... I say if they are known to be all one population, go for it, more genetic diversity, but I know there are many people who feel different.... so tread lightly.


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## sports_doc (Nov 15, 2004)

Rain_Frog said:


> Is it ok to cross bloodlines? I have a WC group of Mantella ebenaui, and I have two CB mantella ebenaui from Mark Pepper. I'm pretty sure they're unrelated, but I can never be certain.
> 
> If I can cross the bloodlines, am I supposed to label them F1s?



If you have a WC group Doug I'm pretty sure they are unrelated to Mark's then also :wink: 

'Cross' away....IMO

I believe technically their offspring can be called F1, although most reserve that designation [somewhat incorrectly] only to identify 'first generation' offspring of WC parents.

Simply enough to label your offspring as coming from WC and CB groups, intermixed [since you dont know who breeds with who, ie: the F1's from Mark growing up and breeding with each other sometimes, and othertimes with some of the WC's]

S


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## insularexotics (May 3, 2005)

Doug,
Not to push a discussion off DB, but this would probably be a better discussion for ASN. And please don't think I'm passing judgement on you or anyone else that crosses bloodlines, morphs, or even species. My concerns with crossing your two bloodlines would be that Mantella taxonomy is so in-flux right now. You don't want to cross two species if your goal is species preservation (I'm making an assumption here that I realize is not necessarily a good one for every frogger). 

Just like there are LOTS of PDF locality morphs, the mantellas in different areas are variable. We don't want to lose that variation any more than we want to lose interspecies Mantella variation or locality dart frog diversity. In the absence of good locality data for either group, I think it best FOR NOW to keep them seperate until such time as we prove them to be genetically identical enough to be called the same frogs. I guess a good question would be: How similar/dissimilar do your two groups look in terms of color, pattern, size?

As another solution, I could send you more Mark Pepper ebenaui (he calls them betsileo) to bolster your Pepper group. Since you're already having success with your WC, you could be the ebenaui emperor!

Just my $0.02
Rich


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## sports_doc (Nov 15, 2004)

Rich is a splitter 

;-)

S


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## insularexotics (May 3, 2005)

Hi my name is Rich. And I'm a splitter. It's been five months since my last hybrid frog breeding event.  

Listen Shawn, you thumnail/eggfeeder-loving excuse for a frogger. You just keep your non-mantella-breeding opinions out of this :twisted: just kidding, of course.

But we can never undo hybrids, if they prove to be different on some level. And cleaning up a bloodline that is even slightly "sullied" is next to impossible once those mutts end up in the hobby. In all seriousness, would you intentionally mix Neighbors and INIBICO imitators? For my part, I would not.
Rich


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## Rain_Frog (Apr 27, 2004)

Man, this is gonna be a toughie. I'm hearing both sides of the argument.

Rich, I'm not saying I support hybrids, but I want good genetic diversity and "standby" frogs because I only have one WC male ebenaui. Maybe this is my experience, but male ebenaui are harder to find than females. If my WC male dies, I'm screwed. (Also, remember ebenaui breed better in groups, but my WC male, Flash, does a good job to impress his two girlfriends  )

At the same time, I see your point. If I mix my breeding groups, I could get either Doug Peel bloodline, Mark Pepper bloodline, or a combination of both. So, I wouldn't be able to tell who bred with whom, as the two CB ebenaui are a pair. :roll: But there are no guarantees that my frogs are unrelated to Pepper's, because they look pretty similar.

However, all three of my WC ebenaui look different.

Corey supports mixing the "lines." I'm curious what Devin has to say.

Rich, I would buy more mark pepper ebenaui (i lost one male over the winter, you can find the post in General health and disease treatment), but I am drastically losing space right now.


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## Rain_Frog (Apr 27, 2004)

what about CB frogs? I have a lone male cobalt I would like to pair up. I have seen some people label their surinam cobalts something like "Nabors x Menigoz."

I have two male anthonyi from Sean Stewart, and two from Bill Heath. However, I think Bill said his line is from Sean's. So, does that make my frogs Heath x Stewart, or Stewart? 

How many lines of CB dart frogs are there?


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## Devin Edmonds (Mar 2, 2004)

This is a good topic, and i've spent a lot of time thinking about it myself. 

Without locale data there isn't really a right or wrong answer. We don't know what population of ebenaui/betsileo your male was collected from, and we don't know where Mark's came from either. The two species can not be told apart based on morphology alone, you need to know where they were collected or do some molecular/genetic stuff to tell the two species apart at this time. So in this situation, if it were me, I would keep the two seperate.

I keep different imports of the same species apart myself, but this doesn't really ensure anything considering it's possible (likely?) that the exporters are obtaining mantella frogs from multiple populations.

I guess you have to ask yourself what the goal is too. What's the purpose of breeding your frogs? Why bother with this attempt to keep populations seperate if offspring are just entering the pet trade anyways? Is that the objective, to produce frogs for the trade (theoretically reducing demand for wild-caught frogs, realistically it's a different story)? or is there something larger in your mind, maintaining a viable captive population that represents one in the wild? Once you establish this, it's easier to figure out if it's best to keep two groups of frogs seperate or not.


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## hylahill (Jan 29, 2008)

Along those lines, I have imi's that are labeled Nabors line that I currently keep separate from an imi that is from INIBCO and another that is a NaborxVillagis cross. All are identical looking and just about impossible to tell apart.

If I am isolating the Nabors line imi's for breeding purposes isn't this a bit like breeding brothers and sisters? Not considered genetically healthy for humans, not sure about frogs :? As all my frogs will never make it back into the wild in their native habitat and are destined to live in little glass houses a long way away from the rain forest, what's the point of keeping them separate? Often the problem with remote isolated numbers of a variety of rare animals is a lack of diversity in the bloodlines.

Again, I currently keep mine separate-however the reality of the situation is it probably doesn't matter.


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## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

I find it somewhat sad and amusing that someone has a nabors x menigoz frog since I'm pretty sure scott menigoz got his tincs from nabors originally.... and nabors has multiple bloodlines so a nabors x menigoz might have animals that were directly related or not related at all - because they are listing the source, not actual useful bloodline information. The SOURCE of the frogs is not the BLOODLINE of the frogs... I adore Scott, he has wonderful frogs, but unless he has the original wild caught frogs and is the distributing source for them, then his name is _not_ the bloodline name. With the addition of "bloodline" to the seller info template for selling frogs, this has gotten a little out of hand...

I still have to wonder about keeping all the imis seperate when the guys who study them in the wild have pretty much said that the green imis are all basically green imis... tho evidently with some of the varibility likely bred out of them. I don't think it's a question about lumping or splitting (like with taxonomy) as much as having the right info to make an informed decision on it (and so far how I've been informed all the green imis are just bloodlines of the same thing and could very much use the bloodline mixing).

Now, with accurate bloodline info... Mark's being from original WC stock, and Doug's being from original WC stock, or WC themselves... I basically think the same as Devin. 

"And for the ebenaui... likely multiple populations of the species were collected over the years, and your best bet for getting the same population would be to get frogs from the same importation group as yours... which would make it more likely they were gathered together, but no garentee. Due to lack of population info... it's really up to you. IMO - none of the animals coming in have info, and if they don't look all that different or act all that different, breed them together. We don't have a huge variety of bloodlines to breed together anyways... we need as much variety as we can get! If we get animals with locality data later I'd recomend not mixing them, but as for what we have now... like with like." (from my other post on amphibianforum)

We know basically jack about the source of either bloodline, and since they are really just in the trade, and would be beneficial to establishing a trade breeding population that could take pressure off wild ones like ASN hopes for, so I'd personally breed them together.

Doug - every PDF that is CB has at least one bloodline going... and with more recently imported animals there can be dozens to hundreds depending on how many of the WCs breed... but the mislabling of bloodlines can cause confusion and make it look like there are more than there are (or less, if you lump all the bloodlines nabors has under just his name, etc).


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## Rain_Frog (Apr 27, 2004)

I wonder if the sunrise ebenaui are either expectata hybrids or if they were collected from a different locale, and got lumped together in the same importation. My memory is fuzzy, but I think Josh Willard received received both types of ebenaui forms. Not to get too far off topic, but do you guys think the blushing mantellas are a sympatric locale alongside ebenaui, expectata, and viridis, or from a completely different location? I remember they were often "contaminated" in expectata imports years ago.


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## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

I haven't honestly seen a good species distribution map of species to really be able to comment... and that's likely because right now there just isn't a good map. Too many species are being broken up/discovered that so much is outdated...

A bit of a pet peeve... but "hybrid" shouldn't be high on your list of "what is going on?" when new animals with characteristics of different well known species show up. Mantellas are becoming well known for having as complex an evolution of mimicry as the Ranitomeya in Peru. Animals that look very different are practically sisters, and animals that look identical could barely be farther apart and still be in the same genus. Another thing... hybrids are generally the exception to the rule, and a rare find... you wouldn't be getting hundreds if not thousands of animals with consistantly similar characteristics if they were recent hybrids. There would only be a few and they typically don't exhibit consistant characteristics... that's how hybridizing has been used in the past to determine relatidness of species (hybrids even of two similar looking species no closely related makes some wonky and highly variable animals!).

So no... I don't think the blushings or the sunsets are hybrids, they are too consistant. The believed Blushing home locality is actually likely to become a species in it's own right (it's a desert species found near - but not necessarily sympatric - to where expectata is and likely just picked up on the way). In their travels the collectors are just picking up what they find... and exporters likely collect animals from a variety of spots. When exporting, they are sorted, and just get tossed in with what the exporter thinks they are. The sunsets and the ebenaui look most similar to the betsileo that they are exported as. The blushings look most similar to the expectata they are exported as. Just because they are received as one species doesn't mean they are related to, or found near that species, even if mixed in with them.

As for the sunsets themselves as an expectata hybrid - not likely at all. They don't share any characteristics other than both having the canary yellow on some part of their body. Other than the yellow to red on the back, the markings, body shape, skin texture, and diamond markings on the back are identical to ebenaui that have come in, only they are smaller in overall size. If they were hybrids I'd expect to see more intermediate characteristics, or more variable characteristics, and a larger, not smaller frog.


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## rozdaboff (Feb 27, 2005)

hylahill said:


> Along those lines, I have imi's that are labeled Nabors line that I currently keep separate from an imi that is from INIBCO and another that is a NaborxVillagis cross. All are identical looking and just about impossible to tell apart.
> 
> If I am isolating the Nabors line imi's for breeding purposes isn't this a bit like breeding brothers and sisters? Not considered genetically healthy for humans, not sure about frogs :? As all my frogs will never make it back into the wild in their native habitat and are destined to live in little glass houses a long way away from the rain forest, what's the point of keeping them separate? Often the problem with remote isolated numbers of a variety of rare animals is a lack of diversity in the bloodlines.
> 
> Again, I currently keep mine separate-however the reality of the situation is it probably doesn't matter.


It depends on what your goals are with breeding - but this case is different than the Mantella case. There is a D. imitator TMP in production through ASN - and hopefully the recommendations set forth in the plan will help with decisions like these.

To use your 3 frogs as an example:
Nabors Imis - don't know where they exactly came from (locality); a mix of other hobby "lines" (Sens, Kelley, etc.)
NaborsxVillega - a further mix of hobby lines with the same lack of locality data
INIBICO - known locality (defined population)

As Corey mentioned, from those in the know (the guys working down there) - all of the green nominat Imis likely originated from the same place. But - what may have happened with the CB frogs further down the line can't be verified. And there is always the chance that they are from a different population.

But with the INIBICO frogs (Cainarachi Valley Imitator - regardless of the green vs. yellow designation when first made available) - we know where they come from. This population of frogs will be one that is actively managed by ASN to ensure genetic diversity. The others will be maintained in a way to prevent their disappearance from the hobby.

How people manage their own frogs is up to them. There are lumpers and there are splitters. Beyond the ASN recommendation of keeping the INIBICO frogs separate, my personal recommendation would be that if you have two non-INIBICO Imis of a known line (Kelley line for example) that you know the lineage for and you can trace them back to the source (Todd Kelley) with confidence, I would keep those separate. But in the case of your two non-INIBICO frogs - I don't think anything would be lost by mixing them. But, I am a self-professed splitter. You will get different opinions. 

But - take home message - keep your INIBICO Imis separate from the others, breed them only with other INIBICO Imis, and register them and their offspring in ASN so that we can successfully manage this population.


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## Corpus Callosum (Apr 7, 2007)

I'm a bit confused as to why the classifying terms of "lumpers" and "splitters" are being thrown around when really the aspect that should be promoted is the process of making informed decisions in the management of one's frogs. Some populations in the wild interbreed while others may have geographic barriers between them that prevent this (Brent wrote a good introductory article on population genetics which can be viewed at http://www.thebdg.org/library/anecdotal ... netics.htm ). From my understanding, the real goal is to research your species/morph, find out how the population occurs in the wild, and find out where all your bloodlines came from with respect to the original population. Then you can decide for yourself whether they should be bred together or not. You should not be a "lumper" or a "splitter", you should find out about what you have and how to deal with it.


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## housevibe7 (Sep 24, 2006)

Thats the point of this designation Mike, atleast in my mind. There isnt always an informed decision to make. Sometimes it is just choosing what you feel is best for your management goals, such as with the nominat form of imitator. Like Brian said, unless you KNOW that your "lines" have been kept "pure" than it is really up to the owner to make the decision on whether they want to be take a "lumper" approach or a "splitter" approach. Now, on the flip side, if you do have a line like the locality known line of INIBICO imi, than by all means those should definately be kept seperate, but when all the research leads to old line nominat imitator being the same population, then really, it DOES come down to how you personally want to manage it.


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## Dancing frogs (Feb 20, 2004)

KeroKero said:


> I find it somewhat sad and amusing that someone has a nabors x menigoz frog since I'm pretty sure scott menigoz got his tincs from nabors originally....


I find it sad and amusing that you read Villagas (as in Thomas) and typed Menigoz... :? 

Your point stands though, as Thomas got his stock from Patrick as well


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## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

Huh? I was referring to Doug's post in which he specifically says :



> I have seen some people label their surinam cobalts something like "Nabors x Menigoz."


So... I'm a bit confused on the Villagas referece? Scott Menigoz has been a pretty prolific hobby breeder and more and more frogs are coming up as "Menigoz" line because of it...

As for lumpers and splitters... unless there is a clear answer, you're always going to have the debate on what should be kept seperate and what shouldn't - even in informed cases. The imitator will always be a classic example... especially with so many splitters saying that you should never ever mix the different importations of the imitator - not bloodlines exactly, but animals from different importations. The INIBICO designation really isn't a bloodline, but a whole group of bloodlines known to be from the same population. They are known "safe" bloodlines to mix. The rest are sketchy... I honestly think a little mixing isn't bad (especially for the older bloodlines with extremely limited gene pools) as long as they are documented as such. 

As for the imis - what are people waiting for to "confirm" that the old lines are the same as the INIBICO animals? Matching the DNA perfectly? I thought all the research did show they would be from the same population since the color and pattern differences "typical" of the different old lines show up in the nominant population and are likely fixed in captive populations due to the selective breeding of the bloodlines. It's the lumper/splitter debate as usual... lumper says "good enough for me!" and the splitter says "show me better evidence to confirm it" (which will likely never happen).

As for the process of making informed decisions... until a database is set up to give the keepers easy access to the information needed to make these decisions, I think they will continue to be haphazard. If as much of this information can get recorded - like in Frogtracks and/or ASN, then we won't lose the information like we do when people drop out of the hobby and the link is broken...


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## Rain_Frog (Apr 27, 2004)

First, I would like to thank Mike for helping explain more of this information in chat.

Second, I would agree with Mike that it may be better not to be either pure "lumper or splitter."

For now, I'm keeping my two ebenaui "lines" separate. Even if they DO come from the same population, breeding management could help increase genetic diversity by breeding individual frogs with others. 

So, even if INIBICO imis are the same as patrick's, there is a better chance they're not related. If people wanted to help genetic diversity, and keep locales pure, we would have better chances at doing this (I believe zoos carefully manage breeding this way?) if we KNOW which frog came where. If we breed at random, even if they are the same, it can make things sloppy and less efficient if your goal is to preserve genetic diversity.

The flip side of the coin, I think it's probably a waste of time right now to distinguish "standard" frogs like surinam cobalts or Santa isabel anthonyi. They are now sold at most reptile dealers and even pet stores, and it would be nearly impossible for a buyer to find out line information. I personally will tell anybody that buys frogs from me where I got my animals, but I won't go the extra mile to make sure they're separate lines, because I think most have either mixed or from the same line.

Now, if I received a group of WC cobalts or SI anthonyi from a known location, then I would keep them separate for a while.


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## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

I think in the end... there will likely be a split in the management of the frogs. There will be highly managed populations - likely animals with locality data, or at least multiple bloodlines from the same importations of those animals. Then I can see there will be general who knows what populations... animals with unknown bloodlines, possible hybrids/designer animals, etc. The hobby has been pulled in these two directions (purests and designers) for a long while now. Lumper and splitter may not be the way to go... and I can imagine limited gene pool bloodlines like some of the imitators (which likely have been suffering from lack of management themselves and are now even more limited) may die out in the "pure" camps while they are blended together with other similar lines in the pet shop camp.


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## Dancing frogs (Feb 20, 2004)

KeroKero said:


> Huh? I was referring to Doug's post in which he specifically says :
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Oops, my bad  I thought you were talking about this post:




hylahill said:


> Along those lines, I have imi's that are labeled Nabors line that I currently keep separate from an imi that is from INIBCO and another that is a NaborxVillagis cross. All are identical looking and just about impossible to tell apart.


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