Spider combos

[t_h_wyman]

@inspirationexotics

I suppose you don’t have any of those in your collection?” No, I don’t. One of the first things I did when I started breeding was learn to identify all of the defect morphs to make sure I never bought one on accident. I don’t and never will have spider, champagne, woma, hgw, or Spotnose. I do have chocolate and blackhead because neither have ever been reported with wobble syndrome in the single gene form, so I will never produce supers and if new evidence comes to light that they can suffer wobble syndrome as single gene, I will remove them from my collection. I work with black pastel/cinnamon but again, only in the single gene form, I will never ever do a pairing that could produce a super

I will counter your gentle correction with another. Arguing that keeping those genes in your collection and will just not make supers is absolutely hypercritical because you are, knowingly and with complete knowledge, perpetuating problematic genes in the gene pool. This is no different than a person with German shepherd that they know carries the degenerative back gene that only breeds it to animals that do not carry the gene. You are still spreading the gene through the population. You sell those animals to other people and they may decide to use them to make supers. So you are just as guilty.

All of this is why I still stand by my post over here:

Ethics of Spiders and Spider Breeding

Late to the party here but I want to ante in. First… . That paper was already posted above and I very specifically called out the problems with it. Posting it again and giving it further credibility as if it were completely valid and definitive just does not sit well with me… . . . Moving on… Matt makes a very coherent statement about the false correlation of motor dysfuntion = pain that was used and embraced for the “banning” of Spider and other morphs in the EU. This was a very purpos…

Tl;DR:

@t_h_wyman

If you do not like Spider personally, great, fine, wonderful for you. Then do not keep Spiders in your collection. But that should be the beginning and end of the conversation. You have no more right to tell me that I cannot have Spider in my collection than I have to tell you that you cannot keep Axanthic in your collection. Your collection is yours. My collection is mine. What you like is up to you. What I like is up to me

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@buckeyeballs

It makes me wonder how these morphs ever evolved at all

Morphs do not “evolve”. They are mistakes that happen because of the imperfect nature of DNA replication. That same process can sometimes give rise to “helpful” mistakes as well, and under selective pressure those mistakes can perpetuate and act as drivers for speciation/evolution

In the wild, most of these morphs would not be perpetuated because there is a selective pressure against them. However, our racks and tubs are not the wild and there is a very clear and profound fitness to morph animals that leads to their continued perpetuation. I would posit that 85% of this hobby is driven by the “designer snake” pyramid scheme, and unless that changes then we will continue to see people breed for morphs
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@buckeyeballs

Why didn’t nature cull the morphs with QOL problems?

To quote Jeff Goldblum - “Life… Uhhhh… Finds a way…”

Sometimes, mutations are not so traumatic that the animal carrying it is immediately picked off. This is why we see things like Scaleless and Albino pop up as adults in the wild. Most of them do get nabbed up, but every now and then one makes it long enough and breeds and passes the gene back into the gene pool.

That said, the other side of the matter is that the majority of our morphs were popped out in farms and not “in the wild”. Trappers go out and hunt down gravid females and wait for them to drop their eggs and then they incubate the eggs and pull aside anything that is different. This has been standard for probably thirty or so years. So the morphs that permeate the hobby never had to “fight for their lives” in the cruel cold jungle