afghanicus crosses

[ang3l3s]

Does anything crossed with afghanicus become smaller ???
Also if u had a raptor/afghanicus x afghanicus would u get pure afghanicus out of the mix, i understand that they are not morphs but would that crossing make pure ones???

 

[GeckoTrouble]

From what I know about genetics, once another sub species/nominate has been added into the mix (in this case the RAPTOR) it does not matter how many times you breed back to the original (Afghanicus) you are still going to produce animals which have some blood from the other sub species.
The more you breed the offspring back into Afghanicus the more they will take on those qualities, but the animal can never be considered pure blood.
Plus it can mess some things up down the line when all of a sudden what you think is a pure Afghanicus will throw back to the RAPTOR blood.
NOTE: Using RAPTOR to denote the alternate sub species or nominate species

 

[Wandering Paddle]

you would never get PURE afghans from that cross. pure afghans only come from other pure afghans
The offspring will vary in size from afghan size to "normal" size...

 

[snowgyre]

The more you breed the offspring back into Afghanicus the more they will take on those qualities, but the animal can never be considered pure blood.

<nerdiness>This isn't necessarily true. In conservation genetics, it's often required to outcross rare subspecies and then breed them back in to increase the number of haplotypes in a generation. However, if you keep backcrossing enough, while you're never going to completely eliminate the genes of the other subspecies, if you do the math you'll eventually get asymptotically close to that original subspecies.

For example, say you outcross, so you have a offspring that is 50/50. You backcross, so you get offspring that are 75% the original subspecies. Backcross again, you 87.5%, then 93.75, then 96.875, then 98.375, all the way up to 99.99% of the original genetics, and you're essentially left with where you started.

It's important to keep in mind that these are probabilities, however. There will always be some influence of the outcrossed subspecies in the population, but the probability that something like RAPTOR would pop up would be minimal after backcrossing so much.

Outcrossing and then backcrossing isn't a bad thing either. In conservation work, we do it from time to time with endangered subpopulations when we have inbreeding depression. Hybridization with other subspecies often increases the genetic and physiological fitness of offspring, especially in situations where a subspecies is genetically impoverished due to low population sizes. However, it's important to know what your goals are before you actually breed or crossbreed anything.

Here's a good example of what I'm talking about. Read the abstract and the conservation implications. They're already doing this with Far Eastern Leopard, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're also managing the Florida Panther similarly.</nerdiness>

 

[GeckoTrouble]

Vanessa, thanks for going into detail about this.
I considered trying to, but realised that I couldn't get it to make sense to anyone other than me LOL

 

[snowgyre]

Haha! No problemo! I'm just glad to know that my life as a professional student hasn't gone to waste. ;-)

 

[ang3l3s]

that was insightful, simplistic yet direct, thanks Vanessa