Is inbreeding a thing with inverts? Namely tailless whip scorpions? There is a breeder in my area that offers these, but they are siblings and I would like to one day produce more. Is this safe? Should I go through two different breeders?
I know with isopods it isn’t a big deal, as they all basically came from the same stock, but I figure it is different for every group of animal?
Thanks!
I can tell you inbreeding in isopods is massively common, same with snakes and some mammals. The first line of inbreeding likely wont matter, and with insects im not sure if it will ever really matter. But anything “line bred” is a fancy way of saying inbred to maintain a certain look.
Inverts seem to be a bit more robust in their tolerance for inbreeding, however I have heard a number of both roach and isopod breeders make comments about needing to “add new blood” to their colonies from time to time, which would lead me to believe that over time it can become an issue
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This is not absolutely true… Check out my episode on Corn Stars (episode 4), I go into a bit of detail on how it is not always the case
I think it would be fine. Inbreeding in inverts isn’t as big of a problem as in vertebrates. So if two siblings were bred together I highly doubt that there would be any noticeable negative effects.
Ill have to check it out, i was always under the impression that “line” stood for family line, and even if some fesh blood that has desirable traits is mixed in every so often, that there is still much in breeding that occurs to get it started, then further down the line there is more spread as sublines are created and bred together.
Most of my knowlege here is just reading and watching others, so direct knowledge it is not.
It is one of those fuzzy matters but technically “line” indicates selective breeding which does not require inbreeding. However, most people correlate line breeding as selective breeding as inbreeding so it gets kind of muddy
I mean, i thought selective breeding and line breeding were 2 different things. I thought selective breeding was picking and choosing what to breed based on desirable traits, and that line breeding was kind of a sub category of it, where a family line is bred, at a more distant relation, and inbreeding is direct decendant / sibling breeding. Choosing only those that display desired traits. (Although technically line breeding and in breeding would both be inbreeding, the distance of the relation is different)
SB having more genetic diversity than LB, because some line breeders find using animals outside of the line to be a dilution of the trait they bred for.
But then again, im sure the bigger issue is scientific term usage vs lay man term usage. Kind of like the word sterilize. Say i get a branch from the woods, and i freeze it at -40c for 7 days. The common person will say they were sterilizing it. However, without an autoclave, true sterilization wouldnt actually take place.
For example, the Britannica definition for line breeding is " Linebreeding is a form of inbreeding that involves selection of mates on the basis of their relationships to a certain superior ancestor ."
But in scientific use, that may differ. I would also like to point out that there are varying levels of inbreeding, close inbreeding is generally done with siblings or parents, however technically it is still inbreeding if a further relative is shared. The effects of inbreeding drop off dramatically the further the relative is away in the tree, making many “line bred” animals inbred by technicality, but not to any reasonable detriment.
I believe the type of breeding you are talking about is “selected lines” or “selective breeding”?
No matter where i look the definition for line breeding is “inbreeding but with more distant relatives” so the only conclussion i can draw is its a matter of people using wrong terms so if somebody says “line bred” it may not actually refer to “line breeding”?
Alright, I also believed that there was a difference between line breeding and selective breeding. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
So, say I found two albino pillbugs that I know were from the same brood. By chance, they are male and female. If I bred them to each other and didn’t add additional blood to keep the lines clean, would I run into problems generations later? I know this happened with many variations of isopods, and decades later they are still going strong. Thanks for all the info.
It is my understanding with invertd it would take many generations of doing this before you run any real risk.
I will put it this way. How many colonies did you have running before? Did you ensure mancae of the same broods were all seperated from eachother? If not, incest definitely happened. Its pretty frequent with brood type animals, theres no natural trigger for them to go wander to another colony for fresh blood. So, in this sense, unless you are target breeding direct descendants back to back to back intentionally and not using the more distantly related siblings, or just letting it take its course, i dont think there will be an issue. Your non morphs are already doing the dirty with their siblings without you ever thinking about it. One same brood pairing isnt going to be the deal breaker haha.