What I am going to do now is show a
theoretical happening or possibility of how several distinctly different phenotypes could potentially be found in a 140 acre jungle.
140 acres is far from a small plot of land and I have
personally never once been in dart frog jungle habitat and NOT found some sort of barrier, be it river, foothill, beach, etc.
The theoretical map I whipped out key is as follows;
Black is known human intervention into natural dart habitat. A road, a dam, and
pens used for breeding. It should be noted that
any time frogs are picked up from one locale and place into another locale it is by definition
human intervention.
Deep Blue is water.
Green are natural barriers such as foothills and sand .
Red is the legal boundary of our theoretical reserve.
A/yellow, B/red, C/brown , D/agua and E/purple represent natural and distinct ancient dart phenotypes.
A and B used to be separated by a very large river, they now only have a trickle of a river going down a small section of shared habitat...
D and E used to be separated by large foothills , they now have a road going down the edges of where the used to be said foothills.
C is in the reserve , but is still isolated by foothills.
You will notice that in overlapping areas of both A-B and D-E we have orange and yellow dots, and we have agua and purple dots, but the main, pure and ancient concentration is not near the overlapping areas.
You will notice that C/brown is still isolated and has zero dots but brown.
I could theoretically collect Yellow, Orange, Aqua , Purple , Brown,
the mixing of Orange and Yellow, and the mixing of Purple and Aqua. But in actuality
only A with B , and D with E have been mixing , and this was caused by human intervention. C is all alone , but still in the 140 acres. While they all have representation (but possibly not the larger extent of the natural population within our reserve) within the boundaries of our reserve, they don't all interbreed. And none of them interbred before human intervention.
1,2,3 and 4 represent pens I am conducting breeding. It would be best to collect frogs
only from areas where you notice
only a single colored dot...and keep the pens segregated with only single phenotypes. I know I'd need more pens to breed all single colors I drew, but a square is easy to draw. :wink:
I have no idea how the animals breeding now were collected. I have no idea how they ended up vastly , hugely polymorphic.
I do know there are several ways this
could have happened and drew out only one theoretical possibility.
I do have a second email with very pointed questions out to WIKIRI and hope to hear back from them soon. A few questions answered may go a loooong way...
I will answer Adam's post previous to mine , in detail, when I wake up and have had cup #2 of tea this morn.