Turtle hybrids

[David R]

Hot house; in the auction you say "Don't miss out on being the first to set up a breeding colony of these. A successful purchase will have first dibs on any males produced this season."

Is it really a good idea to be breeding these hybrids with other hybrids? I understand what you're trying to do by breeding the cooter hybrid back to the pure cooter to breed out the red-ear. But if you took two cooter/red-ear hybrids and bred them together their offspring would probably be a very random mix of the two original species.

IMO the best thing to do would be to sell the female hybrids and only females. keep the males purely for breeding purposes so you can get close to producing a pure cooter, rather than letting people who don't know much about genetics breed two hybrids together thinking that the young will look like their parents.

Not challenging you or trying to start an argument, just sharing my thoughts.

[hothouse]

The offspring from last year are from three separate females and are identical in markings to each other, therefore expect their offspring when they are bred together will resemble themselves. Under no circumstances are I implying that by breeding a male and a female 50/50 cross' offspring to resemble full blooded Eastern River Cooters. I don't know what the exact result will be, which is why I've kept a pair back myself. It will be interesting, and to me this is the exciting part of Reptile Keeping. Nothings as clear as black or white, and as far as Turtles go, they take such long while to mature. (This is certainly nothing new to me.) I have had a clutch laid a few days ago of which four eggs appear fertile and are incubating at the moment for males. Of those four I expect maybe only one (if I'm lucky) to have an embryo form and go full term.

[David R]

The offspring from last year are from three separate females and are identical in markings to each other, therefore expect their offspring when they are bred together will resemble themselves.

If my limited knowledge of genetics is correct (and applies to turtles, I know its true for plants), crossing two pure species together will generally yield fairly consistent looking young. But crossing two of the hybrids together will result in varied and unpredictable offspring with some looking like more parent than another (in both directions) and just about anything in between.

This is why all hybrid plants like roses or camellias are grown from cuttings (or "cloned") because if you pollinated two hybrids the seeds would produce a huge assortment of random flowers.

I can't see why the same wouldn't be true for animals, but I'm not a geneticist so I might be way off. :lol:

[hothouse]

Time will tell. Maybe they should only be sold to someone who wants a different looking Turtle to add to their collection, and to never try breeding from them??? And we have to wait for four-five years to see what happens when I try crossing them together, to see what we come up with.

[repto]

also in the bird world alot of hybrids are often sterile.I doubt if this will be the case with turtles but not impossible.

[Dougstark]

Hothouse, while you are on this thread could you answer a question that was on another thread a few days ago. The question was the sex of Reeves turtle sold on to the market - were they all or mostly male? I posted a denial to this using a comment sent to me from Kerry Hewitt from the National aquarium in Napier. Good to see you getting involved here.

[hothouse]

I have replyed to this on the Baby Reeves Thread.

Cheers

Chris