My curiosity about Cemetery Basti breeding & polymorphism

[Lady Bullseye]

For you pum people, just some things I'm wondering about...

I have just become aware of the Cemetery Basti's polymorphism (is that a word? lol) and it is intriguing to me. So I have some questions...
As I understand it, this morph (or is it locality?) comes in green, orange, yellow, with some others like 'gold dust' being the rarity, and orange being the predominantly occurring color. (as an aside, is gold dust a light color with metallic speckles in it? That is how I imagine it from the name.)

I think it would be fun to have a breeding group that had the potential to throw a variety of the colors as each tad would be a cool surprise!
In the wild, it seems it would be possible for any of these to breed together, so that would be the norm naturally (for them to have the potential for offspring being any color), is this right?
I have only a high school understanding of genetics (and that was many moons ago) so please help me along here. If possible at a less than geneticist level :wink: (also, if the way I word anything makes it seem like I'm going for a particular color or something, that isn't what I mean either.) If it would be discouraged to breed in such a way, to try and get as much variation as possible in the offspring, please let me know and explain.

If this is possible, and ethical, approved of, in the hobby, how would I go about it, short of getting WC specimens. Would it require several generations of my own, and learning a lot more about genetics lol. to know the type of offspring that could be produced? or are there others out there that know the parentage of their frogs enough that it wasn't (genetically) like to like and the variety could be there?

I hope this makes sense, trying to make my thoughts clear, and I'm not sure I succeeded...

[Philsuma]

Hi Lisa,

As I understand it, the Oophaga pumilio (Strawberry Dart Frog) 'Cemetery Bastimentos' locale is quite possibly the single type of dart frog in the U.S Hobby than can indeed be 'mixed by colour and pattern' and produce some varied and interesting offspring. That population can also produce some white, tan, black-ish, blue and green coloured animals.

IMO you can obtain any year import, as long as the owner can honestly say he believes them to be 'Basti' imports and you are satisfied with their appearance. You should not encounter any hobby 'backlash' or problems unless you try to be a 'Duster' for example, and breed selectively or line-breed. And if not, you will still find some hobbyists that ok with that. There is NO SUCH code or body of ethics in this hobby other than - "Read the Forums and Feel the Flavour" and choose your course of hobby action / activity. I believe you have been reading the various posts on breeding and ethics to support your own learned conclusion by now just as I bet you could have quessed as to my answers type here.

If you are interested in pumilio I would HIGHLY recommend buying CvDL's pumilio book as well as scouring the Dutch and German websites for pictures of population, locale and 'morph' examples.

[RichFrye]

Hi Lisa,
I'm not sure exactly what the main question is. But I can try to bottom line the wild situation how it relates to our captive breeding.

There is a pum locale we call Cemetery. The frogs are about 80% comprised of orange individuals. Next followed by red and then the lesser minorities such as green, blue, goldust, yellow, peach, etc.

The orange will occasionally throw the minorities generally following the percentages , as a population, I mention above. And the minorities will throw a variety of colors too.
The percentage of minority offspring produced by captive bastis has not really been documented, but the change in captivity ( food stuffs, temps, humidity, etc.) does not seem to effect the colors produced or skew the percentages to a rate at which we need to think external input is causing the minority colors , but rather genetics.

When breeding for healthy animals which came from long established populations it is usually best to breed to the norm , mean or standard of the population. Anything which is far left , right up or down is working away from the average genetics of the population. It is also working away from the natural selection and drift which has been occurring for quite some time in that established population.

When in doubt there is absolutely no down side to breeding two unrelated orange together and waiting to see what they produce. If someone wanted to breed a minority to the majority this would be slightly less of an occurrence in the wild , due to the fact there are less minorities to breed with any color, but the minorities breed with a color in that population so a pairing of minority to majority is not going that far away from the mean.
What IS greatly against the natural possibility is that there are 2% minority to 2% minority (gold dust to gold dust ) breeding to each other in that wild population. The math, along with studies proving pums search out brighter mates, (gold dust being less bright than orange, yellow, red) and the fact that GD are less aposematic all ads up to the match of GD to GD or any 2% representation to any 2% representation as unnatural. Not impossible , someone wins the lotto each week.

[Lady Bullseye]

Thanks Phil and Rich, this pretty much answers what I was wondering.
My 'dream' breeding setup would be a whole greenhouse or whatever size it took to have every color and see what comes of it just whatever they chose as mates.
The reality with our small glass boxes... I think I would enjoy, would not be to breed minorities together, but to do like you mentioned with 1 of the majority color (say if I had a trio) and two of the minority colors and see what color each offspring turns out. It would be fun, to have the element of surprise each time.

[RichFrye]

The greenhouse set-up with all the cemetery colors and shades would be the ultimate way to go. it would be great to see what was hopping around after a decade or so of choosing from 20-30 mates. Loved the idea.

I had an indoor "Uberviv" :

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=276

lean-to greenhouse years back set up with 1:3 darklands and it was a lot of fun. It'd walk inside and the male would call inches from my head. He was not bother at all by me poking around.

[Lady Bullseye]

I remember reading that thread Rich, thought it was really cool. That is so neat that he didn't even mind you there