Actually I believe there was three collections. The first was lost.
The second was very small and is one of the viability problems I'm
worried about. The third will hopefully regenerate the species.
><< But then I think even the folks down under can't always take a few
>week trip to just get a few more fish when a population group is going
>down hill.>>
>
>All we need is an excuse - seriously it is sadly only too true! Once
>again a call for a set of reasonable breeding program guidelines (as per
>the ACN) seeems to be in order.
I have the ANC breeding guidelines. Unfortunately if we were to follow
those guidelines we'd need multiple people each devoting 10 tanks to
each species. It would be nice but not even the ANC has found many
(any) people willing to operate under their program rules. It was a
nice idea, and would certainly maintain the viabilty if a large enough
founding group was used. But resources are limited. Instead of keeping
over 20 species I'd be down to just a couple species.
What I'd really like is feedback on which species can be maintained as
linebred stock without problems and which must be outcrossed to other
fish of the same strain to maintain viablity. There is also one other
consideration, which species are actually hurt by out crossing? To go
back to M pygmaea, now that there is a new captive population will it
begin to suffer the same viablity problems as the early collection?
Will crossing the two collections hurt the captive specimens or help
it? I know there has been some discusion by folks working with
threatened species that some species have very little heterzygosity in
their gene pools and crossing them with the same species from other
collections actually hurts the viability of the captive species.
Basically you bring in bad genes to a stabilized population and the
species suffers. I believe they term the condition out-breeding
depression as opposed to inbreeding depression. Both can be a problem
that could wipe out our captive populations.
I just think we need to make a few notes and publish them on which
species are suffering from either of these two conditions. So future
bow keepers can learn from our mistakes and successes.
Cary Hostrawser
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