Death Pony;4323103; said:
You did not miss much, all he ever did was lay around motionless at the bottom of the tank. the best thing was his handler and feeder guy only had one arm! Always wondered.....
Rare River Monster
- Thread starter FishNCash
- Start date
You did not miss much, all he ever did was lay around motionless at the bottom of the tank. the best thing was his handler and feeder guy only had one arm! Always wondered.....
Inbreeding depression acts the same for all populations that have sustained a heavy bottleneck. Once you drop below the viable population size, extinction becomes a matter of time. There isn't a stud book system in the world that could fix that either. You can't get new genes that way, just the same combinations that you already have. It would be like blending two eggs together and hoping to make orange juice. Just not going to happen.EricIvins;4323227; said:
LRM;4324034; said:
all he is saying is that reptiles can handle inbreeding without the immediate side effects that mammals get. It takes the degeneration much much longer to manifest itself. If the population is a few hundred strong, I think that it would be enough to sustain it.
Thats why you need to take enough founder stock from a healty wild population to serve as emegency reserve in case something goes bad in the wild. However unlike what you said it is indeed possible both to save a animal in captivity (zoos and private entusiasts do it all the time) assuming it is a relativelly easy species to manange in captivity and if you have enough founder stock to represent most or all of the wild genetic diversity you wont have a bottle neck, you will endup with a captive population close in a genetic point of view to the original wild one...that is assuming that all of the genetic material is used (all founder animals breed) and that good husbandry practises are used to ensure maximum genetic variability, basicly the begining of a new population. The problem with captive chitas is that they have low genetic variability to begin with, many founder females are either too old or not behaviorly receptive to mating and most zoos simply dont have the correct conditions to raise chitas in captivity. Chitas in captivity belong in zoos with huge outdoor spaces for example in Arizona, not in a moisty or cold climates. And this is too a problem if gharials where to be bred in captivity outside India. In northern climate zoos, indoor gharials and other big croc species simply dont get enough direct sun ligth, space, deep water and social interactions to trigger serious breeding responses. Want more gharials? Put them all in a plane and ship them to a huge outdoor/indoor custom made facility in Florida where they can spend most of the year in outdoor ponds and then you will see if they dont breed.LRM;4324034; said:
Oh and by the way, you DO indeed get new genes, even from the same combos, otherwise evolution would not happen. But yea it can take a long time to happen, the outcome may not even be a interesting one for survival (ex: albinism) and that if it happens at all. However there are several species with minimal genetic diversity that do just fine like pere´s David deer.
Does anyone know which kinds of fish these beasts eat.I don't know much about the fish of that area,just wondering.
