# Ethics of line breeding



## Quaz (Nov 13, 2005)

lets stick to a specific topic.and not get into a fight.

Question? do you feel it's ethical to line beed terribilis for earlier color change as a froglet?

I bought several orange terrib tads and noticed that on had a silvery sheen as a tad and morphed almost completely orange. would you feel that it would be ok to keep him and other early oranges so that when they are for sale as froglets they are more atractive? 

It's funny, as I write this it's like I could be talking about a variety of plant. I can forsee the frogs on the vendor table "early orange" terribilis.


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## Rain_Frog (Apr 27, 2004)

> I bought several orange terrib tads and noticed that on had a silvery sheen as a tad and morphed almost completely orange. would you feel that it would be ok to keep him and other early oranges so that when they are for sale as froglets they are more atractive?


They're your frogs. Choose your destiny. As long as all terribilis in the hobby do not originate just from this line, especially if one is involved with ASN for genetic management, I could care less.


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## chesney (Jan 18, 2007)

Good question. When I raise a group of froglets to make pairs (usually 6 or so), I always pick the pair I like best for the qualities I like in them. For example, I recently raised up 6 Yellowbacks from two different sources. I ended up with 3 pair. Out of the 3 pair, two of the females were Saul. I kept the pair that I liked best (with a Saul female and a solid yellow back male). I did this in hopes of getting a variety of froglets. Had one of the Sauls been male, I still would have tried pairing him up with a solid yellow back female. I like variety. In nature it could happen by chance, so I can't see why it would be a problem to use the Terribilis for their early orange color. Others may disagree.


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## rcteem (Mar 24, 2009)

Quaz said:


> lets stick to a specific topic.and not get into a fight.
> 
> Question? do you feel it's ethical to line beed terribilis for earlier color change as a froglet?
> 
> ...


My thoughts on line breeding are this....DONT DO IT! When people line breed it causes several problems. One, they line becomes more and more inbred. Two, causes false implementations of the wild dart frogs in the Amazon. Three, opens Pandora's box for this hobby to become more and more like the ball python/ leopard gecko hobby. And lastly, this hobby is completely different than any other hobby I have seen. We have plenty of natural species out there to get a look you are wanting probably minus the color purple really. We are working with frogs that could easily be extinct in the wild in another hundred years. 

I am in no way interested in seeing tons of albinos, genetically bred down lines of frogs so they have no dots, etc, etc, etc in our hobby so we have some funky lines for people. I do think it is okay if you want a melenistic cobalt or your albino cobalt to breed with your normal cobalts. This isn't selective breeding unless your trying to breed them back to there parents. This is just my thoughts on the situation and hope you see where I am coming from.


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## JeremyHuff (Apr 22, 2008)

So, do you think breeding 2 Nabors line azureus together or 2 UE benedictas or 2 Stewart line vanzos is OK???? Isn't this type of line breeding just as bad or possibly worse in the long run than just choosing traits? Nobody knows what quantities or diversity these various people lines originated from, yet the hobby seems to insist that this is OK. Also, Tan, Stewart, Nabors, etc for the most part came from European stock and could all be one and the same. Nobody knows...





rcteem said:


> My thoughts on line breeding are this....DONT DO IT! When people line breed it causes several problems. One, they line becomes more and more inbred. Two, causes false implementations of the wild dart frogs in the Amazon. Three, opens Pandora's box for this hobby to become more and more like the ball python/ leopard gecko hobby. And lastly, this hobby is completely different than any other hobby I have seen. We have plenty of natural species out there to get a look you are wanting probably minus the color purple really. We are working with frogs that could easily be extinct in the wild in another hundred years.
> 
> I am in no way interested in seeing tons of albinos, genetically bred down lines of frogs so they have no dots, etc, etc, etc in our hobby so we have some funky lines for people. I do think it is okay if you want a melenistic cobalt or your albino cobalt to breed with your normal cobalts. This isn't selective breeding unless your trying to breed them back to there parents. This is just my thoughts on the situation and hope you see where I am coming from.


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## Rain_Frog (Apr 27, 2004)

> I am in no way interested in seeing tons of albinos, genetically bred down lines of frogs so they have no dots, etc, etc, etc in our hobby so we have some funky lines for people. I do think it is okay if you want a melenistic cobalt or your albino cobalt to breed with your normal cobalts. This isn't selective breeding unless your trying to breed them back to there parents. This is just my thoughts on the situation and hope you see where I am coming from.


We already have many morphs of pacman frogs, albino green tree frogs, blue dumpies, albino xenopus, blue phase of Polypedates dennysi, blue Lithobates castabeiana, albino gray tree frogs, super blue auratus, fine spot azureus, blue bombina orientalis, etc-- the list goes on.

Has the wild type of all these species phased out of the hobby? Nope. And I see mostly standard, "plain" leopard geckos, ball pythons, beardies, etc. at most pet stores.

How do we know we're not already line breeding our frogs? What we think is "fit and healthy" or "breeds well" may not be successful in the wild. 

If you don't want these animals, don't buy them. Already seen by the Regina / Giant Orange comparison, the arguments that "well, I don't want to see a 'new morph' that's really a hybrid / morph cross" has less weight.


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## Chris Miller (Apr 20, 2009)

Here's how I feel about hybrids/mixing/line-trait breeding:

While you have the right to binge drink, you don't have the right to puke in my car.

A big problem with line breeding/hybridizing/messing around is that there is always a risk of the junk frogs making it into the mainstream hobby without accurate information. Registration is the best way to minimize the risks and gives people who want to avoid you/your frogs the ability to do so.

As to the ethics part of line/trait breeding:

In my opinion, you need to look at the history, current status and potential future of the species in the hobby to determine if what you want to do is ethical. Remember that these frogs were taken from the wild at some point (making us ultimately responsible for their survival), and that you only have a limited amount of capital (both money and time) to spend on keeping them.

Figure out if the way you are spending your time and money is in the best interest of the frogs and the hobby. With some frogs, yes, you can probably mess around with their genes and not harm anything providing you are forthright about everything and register your frogs. With other frogs, no, it would be in the best interest of the frogs to work at managing them in captivity rather than playing with their genes.

If you do some research, you will see that terribilis fall into the latter category - at least to me. Like I said at the top, do what you want just don't...


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## skylsdale (Sep 16, 2007)

I am looking at this from the standpoint of the longterm care and management of the species (and by longterm, I mean decades and beyond...not 2 years from now).

In order to maintain as healthy a captive stock/population as possible, we want to maintain maximum genetic diversity. Line and selective breeding hampers this (and by line breeding, I mean taking a select few animals from a larger captive population and only breeding those selected animals). This not only greatly reduces the genetic material available to those animals and their offspring, but also reduces the diversity that was part of the overall captive population's genetic pool. This can lead to several problems that have been discussed before, so I won't do it here (outbreeding depression, etc.). It also limits the DNA being passed along that may be latent and not expressing itself in the phenotype of the animal...but could be beneficial or crucial for the population later on (a la epigenetic factors).

But my interest is in seeing these animals exist and express themselves as naturally as possible, even though they are in captivity. I realize that some people just want über cool frogs...which is fine as well. The damage comes when it becomes like the herp hobby at large with the various phases and morphs, etc. and everyone is trying to selectively create something that no one else has. I'm sorry, but despite the cacophony of not-so-clever names I've seen at reptile expos, a crested gecko is a crested gecko. I'm sure at some point we'll start seeing "Ultra Tangerine" terribilis. But personally, I hope that day takes a while to get here.

Also,


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## rcteem (Mar 24, 2009)

JeremyHuff said:


> So, do you think breeding 2 Nabors line azureus together or 2 UE benedictas or 2 Stewart line vanzos is OK???? Isn't this type of line breeding just as bad or possibly worse in the long run than just choosing traits? Nobody knows what quantities or diversity these various people lines originated from, yet the hobby seems to insist that this is OK. Also, Tan, Stewart, Nabors, etc for the most part came from European stock and could all be one and the same. Nobody knows...


Isnt this the same as a breeder selling a probable pair off from frogs he has grown up??? No I dont consider this line breeding...If you keep breeding the same frogs to F8s for example, without new bloodlines, I consider to be another issue though. Line Breeding is to me is when you have an oddball tinc, for example my melenistic bakhuis, and try to breed those together to repeat the color/ pattern is line breeding in my mind. Another example is these FS Azureus, where you breed them for not having spots or micro spots. If you have an odd ball frog and want to keep it and breed it with normals I do not see any harm in that.


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## Quaz (Nov 13, 2005)

good to see the healthy discussion. I'm glad that so many people are dedicated to keeping darts as natural as possible. If you look at the terribillis range it's not very big at all and it is very possible that you and I and zoos will have the only ones for people to see. 

I'm sure we'll have both options in the hobby. to buy the natural variety or the modified but like the recent thread on the majority of azureus now being more washed out bc of line breeding for the fine spot. will we just see the more natural frogs fading away wo noticing it. will we wake up one day and think back to 2011 when the orange terribs in the hobby morphed with two orange stripes and not fully orange?
I'm just thinking now about a group of altum angels in an aquarium and how excited I was to see the nateral veriety of angel wo flowing veiled fi.ns.

I


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## Woodsman (Jan 3, 2008)

Hi Ron,

I think most of the hobbyists would agree with your statements, but the reality is that we are not doing a very good job at maintaining genetic diversity in the hobby. For frogs that do not carry very definite locality data (i.e. almost all D. tinctorius), most people only breed the frogs based on importation date or (more commonly) the "lines" that are established by long term breeders. By keeping breeder-lines separate, every generation of frogs becomes more and more bottle-necked and less representative of wild populations.

Line breeding from frogs that are already (essentially) line bred only makes things much worse.

Take care, Richard.





skylsdale said:


> I am looking at this from the standpoint of the longterm care and management of the species (and by longterm, I mean decades and beyond...not 2 years from now).
> 
> In order to maintain as healthy a captive stock/population as possible, we want to maintain maximum genetic diversity. Line and selective breeding hampers this (and by line breeding, I mean taking a select few animals from a larger captive population and only breeding those selected animals). This not only greatly reduces the genetic material available to those animals and their offspring, but also reduces the diversity that was part of the overall captive population's genetic pool. This can lead to several problems that have been discussed before, so I won't do it here (outbreeding depression, etc.). It also limits the DNA being passed along that may be latent and not expressing itself in the phenotype of the animal...but could be beneficial or crucial for the population later on (a la epigenetic factors).
> 
> ...


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## epiphytes etc. (Nov 22, 2010)

i think that as long as we maintain an active registry, selective breeding should not be an issue. look at orchids. grocery stores and home depot, etc. are overrun with hybrid mongrels. yet these plants are what end up getting people interested in the first place. there will always be people who breed only pure species. can species be bought at walmart? no. but one can locate and buy nearly any pure species they want. loads of people started out with a hybrid phalenopsis, and now have become serious hobbyists. they key is registration.


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