Re: breeding programs recognizing maintenance

Cary Hostrawser (caryho at ix.netcom.com)
Wed, 24 Apr 1996 19:43:02 +0000 (GMT)

On Wed, 24 Apr 96 10:54 EDT, you wrote:
>The Tropical Fish Club of Burlington (VT) has for the past five years or so
>had a Breeder's Award Program designed to encourage the breeding & maintenance
>of rare/endangered/threatened species. This is done in two ways.
>
>First, the point value of the fish is based on a combination of difficulty of
>breeding and availability in the hobby. While availability in the hobby does
>not map to situation in the wild, this criteria still encourages people to
>work with the fish that are not getting all the attention (e.g., not
>praecox!).
>Secondly, the breeder gets bonus points for each successive generation of a
>species presented. Most BAP programs only allow you to get points for a fish
>once; this one was designed to encourage people to maintain a particular
>species for many years. There's no way to ensure that the fish aren't inbred,
>of course, but we wanted to at least recognize the concept of (gasp) working
>with the same species for many years.

I for one am certainly interested. My local also gives points for
rarity of the species. Unfortunately its also only for hobby rare
fish. I'd like to point out a couple of my own thoughts for such a
program for comments and input.
You don't really want to be churning over generations of a species. So
it would really be better to give points for maintaining a back up
generation to the adult generation, but keeping the adults. Every year
they could reproduce a new back up generation and get points when they
turn over the old back up. This way you encourage them they to keep
the older and more genetically diverse fish. The longer they can keep
the older generation, the more points you could give. Also you could
give an increased point level if people work together on a species.
This way you could have fish from the same original colony but
different parents and cross the lines together each generation or so.
Again you can give points when they bring these lines together to
produce a new adult generation.
These are basically some of the guidelines I plan to use in the RSG's
long term breeding program.

Any other ideas that could help to encourage people and improve on
such a program, I would really be glad to hear. Maybe if we start a
discussion here and flush out some good ideas we could get local
aquarium societies to pick up on the ideas and add them to or expand
their BAP programs to include them. Too many of these programs just
churn over fish with out any thought to longer term species
maintenance.

Thanks
Cary Hostrawser

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