11-25-2012, 08:20 PM
Kind of a question to help me along with school and keep me refreshed on the material we are currently covering. Do people in the community ever go out of their way to get new frogs or swap frogs with someone else to get "new blood" into their offspring? I'm kind of assuming all of our collections can be traced back to a handful of parent frogs. Some obviously because that's about all there is, kind of lack of options. Have you guys who have been in the hobby for several years and had successful breeding ever have the random mutations with your offspring that have survived? I guess to keep the negative effects of inbreeding to a minimum it would be smart if you had a buddy with the same species to trade males or females after a while to get a little extra allele diversity via gene flow. But I guess sometimes in the wild there are so small numbers of some species that there is isn't much of a choice on reproductive partners. My book is saying that in smaller populations that the average number of alleles per locus can be smaller than in larger populations. Some prairie chickens in Illinois had this happen and their population diminished as farmland increased and they had to introduce other chickens to increase the genetic variation because they were only having about a 50% hatch rate...at least that's what they are teaching these days. Anyways, do you think our frogs are at risk for similar situations over the years to come or is it different because we control their environments and harmful alleles aren't likely to be introduced...well except by those people who choose to play God.
Josh