Do morphs dictate personality to any extent?

[tastyworms]

So something I've been wondering about... Do different morphs tend to have different personalities associated with them? Or is it purely a visual trait?

 

[OneFootedAce]

Blizzards are supposed to be the "mean" morph. That's the only personality trait that i can think of that's related to morphs.
How much of this is the truth or a coincidence? I'm voting for a coincidence...

 

[triplegex]

I have also found most super snows are really chill...

 

[Dog Shrink]

My mack snow boy is pretty sweet. IDK if I'd describe him as chill just yet tho.

 

[fl_orchidslave]

My sweet enigma girl thinks she's a bearded dragon.

 

[Jordan]

people say that blizzards are sketchy and raptors are all jumpy and skitty. but i think thats just people being over analysing. I wouldnt say the morph makes any difference, its like saying eye colour on humans makes a difference...

 

[tlbowling]

I heard that Phantoms were the best as far a nice and calm goes...But I dont own a phantom, so Im not speaking from experience, just what I read somewhere.

 

[snowgyre]

I have heard that melanistic ball python morphs (like cinnamon, black pastel, etc) are a lot meaner than the lighter morphs. Spiders and pastels are almost always peaches. Not sure about leopard geckos though, I've had a variety of morphs and haven't noticed any patterns.

 

[M_surinamensis]

people say that blizzards are sketchy and raptors are all jumpy and skitty. but i think thats just people being over analysing.

The term you want is observational bias. And you're pretty much right.

I wouldnt say the morph makes any difference, its like saying eye colour on humans makes a difference...

There are a couple points which make that quote a bit... inaccurate. Without being wrong exactly.

Behavior in all species has a strong genetic component. Including our own, although we don't like to admit it because it detracts from the illusion of free will.

There are certain behaviors, responses to stimulus, that are basically pre-programmed at the time a zygote is formed. The variability in those behaviors is generally slight and far more difficult to measure than with physical traits. It is more difficult to determine with any degree of reliability if a line of geckos is more prone to biting when scared (for example) than other lines than it is to determine if they are (again for example) bright yellow. It is a trait that is less easily measured, especially since it immediately runs afoul of the observational bias you have already mentioned and the difficulty in providing truly identical stimulus for control groups.

The genetic basis for behaviors is pretty much why those actions can evolve in the same way any physical trait can. If the territorially aggressive male gets all the females and passes along his aggressive genes, the species will show that behavior more and more strongly over time. If turning around and biting a would be predator allows an animal to escape and live to breed, that behavior gets passed on. The variability when looking at all animals is enormous... but that variability only arises due to the variability that is present inside any population. The differences aren't always extreme, leopard geckos are on the whole pretty predictable, but a bell curve by its very nature includes statistical outliers.

So once you accept that you can have some degree of variability in behaviors inside a species and that those behaviors have a genetic basis, you can look at the way that captive lines tend to be intensely crossed back into themselves, especially to establish color morphs for the pet trade. If you take a source animal that is slightly more ________ (fill in the blank with a behavior) and then cross it back to its own parents, children and siblings for fifteen or twenty generations, you have seriously destroyed the idea of genetic diversity and exponentially increased all of the traits that were present in the initial (small) gene pool.

The line breeding, combined with how much of a leopard geckos behavior is procedural rather than declarative, is why the comparison to human eye color is inaccurate. The natural process of behavioral evolution is long and complex, since the weight of behavioral traits gaining dominance or seeing success is weighed against all of the traits in the entire population. Captive breeding efforts retard natural selection and remove many of the factors that would impact wild pairings, so we can see far more extreme results in a far shorter time. Potentially including leopard geckos that want to eat fingers.

I feel like I am on the verge of starting in about bananas and sunfish so... I think I'll leave it at that, unless any of it was unclear. If so, just yell and I'll clarify.

 

[Dog Shrink]

Just from my experience with dogs, take great danes for example... there are DEFINITE differences in personality among the colors. Blacks and blues were used mostly for police and military work so they tend to be more "sharp", brindles and fawns were used mostly for hunting game, so they tend to be more go go go, and the harlequin and mantle were used for guarding wide open estates so they tend to be the largest and most phlegmatic of the colors. breeders adhere to a strict code of ethics when breeding and are not suppose to cross color the gene pools meaning no black with fawn, no brindle with harli etc. I think it's because of that code of ethics that the dane has stayed so true to it's original heritage for hundreds of years with the intent/type for the color groups.

I think there would be noticeable differences between the morphs in leos, esp. in strongly line bred groups. If you breed inhearantly pissy animals your offspring are going to be pissy... you breed sweet temperamented animals and you should get sweet babies. Morph is just the outward distinguishing feature we can relate to... so we say Blizzards can be mean, well maybe the foundation stock was mean hence the higher propencity for seeing mean blizzards.

 

[Jordan]

The term you want is observational bias. And you're pretty much right.



There are a couple points which make that quote a bit... inaccurate. Without being wrong exactly.

Behavior in all species has a strong genetic component. Including our own, although we don't like to admit it because it detracts from the illusion of free will.

There are certain behaviors, responses to stimulus, that are basically pre-programmed at the time a zygote is formed. The variability in those behaviors is generally slight and far more difficult to measure than with physical traits. It is more difficult to determine with any degree of reliability if a line of geckos is more prone to biting when scared (for example) than other lines than it is to determine if they are (again for example) bright yellow. It is a trait that is less easily measured, especially since it immediately runs afoul of the observational bias you have already mentioned and the difficulty in providing truly identical stimulus for control groups.

The genetic basis for behaviors is pretty much why those actions can evolve in the same way any physical trait can. If the territorially aggressive male gets all the females and passes along his aggressive genes, the species will show that behavior more and more strongly over time. If turning around and biting a would be predator allows an animal to escape and live to breed, that behavior gets passed on. The variability when looking at all animals is enormous... but that variability only arises due to the variability that is present inside any population. The differences aren't always extreme, leopard geckos are on the whole pretty predictable, but a bell curve by its very nature includes statistical outliers.

So once you accept that you can have some degree of variability in behaviors inside a species and that those behaviors have a genetic basis, you can look at the way that captive lines tend to be intensely crossed back into themselves, especially to establish color morphs for the pet trade. If you take a source animal that is slightly more ________ (fill in the blank with a behavior) and then cross it back to its own parents, children and siblings for fifteen or twenty generations, you have seriously destroyed the idea of genetic diversity and exponentially increased all of the traits that were present in the initial (small) gene pool.

The line breeding, combined with how much of a leopard geckos behavior is procedural rather than declarative, is why the comparison to human eye color is inaccurate. The natural process of behavioral evolution is long and complex, since the weight of behavioral traits gaining dominance or seeing success is weighed against all of the traits in the entire population. Captive breeding efforts retard natural selection and remove many of the factors that would impact wild pairings, so we can see far more extreme results in a far shorter time. Potentially including leopard geckos that want to eat fingers.

I feel like I am on the verge of starting in about bananas and sunfish so... I think I'll leave it at that, unless any of it was unclear. If so, just yell and I'll clarify.

Interesting, so what your saying is as we breed for the colour of the animal were often passing on the personality etc with it, so if we start with a sketchy blizzard and carry on breeding blizzards from this then this behaviour/personality gets passed on with it becoming stronger when bred back and to each oother etc.
Or if the gecko to carry the random mutation that is now the blizzard morph had this behaviour/personality it has been passed on with the genetic trait of the morph, hence despite not breeding for this personality but breeding for the morph weve actually weaved into the morph this behaviour?

lol, let me know if ive got the wrong end of the stick, i may be clever enough to solve rubiks cubes in 20 seconds and breed leopard gecko's but im still only 17 at the end of the day lol.

 

[Dog Shrink]

That's pretty much it Jordan. When you breed you're breeding the total package... color, temperament, faults, ect. EVERYTHING, and when you line breed it intensifies those traits whether it's for the better or worse.

 

[T-ReXx]

I agree. Personality to an extent can be linked genetically. In reptiles it's not as solid as in "higher" animals like mammals, but it does show up in my experience. Breed two jumpy leopard geckos together, do nothing to influence behavior patterns(regular handling, hand feeding etc) and they will usually be more skittish than comparable offspring from a calm pair bred raised under identical conditions. So, in a way yes, morph can affect temperment. In my experience, Blizzards tend to be moody, Giants tend to be more laid back, Raptors are a bit on the skittish side, and snows can go either way. A big part of it is the way the animal is raised and it's interaction and perception of humans; a baby blizzard that is handled every day and hand fed is no more likely to be aggressive than any other morph raised under the same conditions, and a giant that is rarely handled and doesn't view humans as a food source is just as likely to be nervous when interacted with. So, to answer the original poster's question; yes it can, but no it doesn't always.

 

[Jordan]

but if personality can be passed on almost like a dominant trait, then surely by now due to so much breeding that a calm normal must have been bred to a blizzard (or something similar) and eventually produced calm blizzards... and so on for other morphs. So there must be a lot of calm blizzards and a lot of sketchy blizzards, and alot of skittish raptors and a lot that arent... through years of breeding different personalities to different morphs, how is it even distiguishable as one morph to be more skittish when theyre must be a pretty even amount of calm and non calm personalities if you get me? lol

 

[Dog Shrink]

Referrs Jordan back to the line breeding comments. yes there has been a TON of out breeding BUT still the foundation will carry thru for several generatons after the original breeding despite out breeding. Again look at dogs... take any pure bred dog, 90% of them act the same way they did hundreds of years ago when the foundation stock was created and the standard written. Personality WAS something that had to be consistant amongst the breeds... Labs... 90% of labs are sweet clownish fun loving dogs, the other 10% can be nasty aggressive mean spirited dogs that should have been culled as soon as the trait was noticed in order to maintain consistant type in body and behavior. It's when ignorent profit hounds that are only breeding for money choose to incorporate those poor examples of the breed into a breeding project that the problem is perpetuated.

Since the main reason leos are bred is color, personality will often be overlooked in pursuit of the perfect color morph. Imo that is only breeding for part of the package because personally I'll sacrafice looks for personality any day. Like T-Rexx said, in a nut shell, it's the nature versus nurture theory. Some behavioral traits can be bred out, or trained out (with higher intelligence species), others there no fighting mother nature.

 

[gmaier19]

from the VERY small sample size of 5 geckos that i own, my blizzard is definitely the most skittish. also, nothing to do with morphs but... the 2 males that i have are much more relaxed than the 3 females. hard to come to conclusions with such a small sample size, but its my experience.

 

[T-ReXx]

That's another good point. Although gender doesn't have much to do with it, male leopard geckos are known to be slightly more likely to be easy to handle than females. Now part of this has to do with hormones and ovulation, females who are ovulating are uncomfortable and likely to be irritable(in many different species, haha).

 

[M_surinamensis]

Interesting, so what your saying is as we breed for the colour of the animal were often passing on the personality etc with it, so if we start with a sketchy blizzard and carry on breeding blizzards from this then this behaviour/personality gets passed on with it becoming stronger when bred back and to each oother etc.
Or if the gecko to carry the random mutation that is now the blizzard morph had this behaviour/personality it has been passed on with the genetic trait of the morph, hence despite not breeding for this personality but breeding for the morph weve actually weaved into the morph this behaviour?

lol, let me know if ive got the wrong end of the stick, i may be clever enough to solve rubiks cubes in 20 seconds and breed leopard gecko's but im still only 17 at the end of the day lol.

You got it. Dead on in fact, when we breed animals we breed everything about them. We may choose them for one or two traits (like color and pattern) but we're also breeding for everything from behavior to immune system response and the ability of the animal to metabolize nutrients to the length of their tongue.

And under captive conditions, the idea of natural selection, which (over many successive generations) weeds out weaker traits while reinforcing strong ones is very close to nonexistent. Failure to thrive thresholds are radically different, the traits which are most likely to see an animal regularly mated are radically different.

And since we tend to do a lot of line breeding, selection for those traits we appreciate and value, changes and development of traits happens pretty rapidly inside those lines. Three or four generations can see a monumental difference and the rapid development of a trait when there is no outcrossing and no risk of animals carrying it falling prey to the elements, disease, predators or simply failing to mate.

It is part of why I get so uppity when I read about people not culling and (worse yet) breeding animals with negative traits simply to reproduce some aspect they like. They think they are breeding a color or a pattern, but they are actually breeding every single minute detail of that animal. Selecting stock should always take into account the total animal; color and pattern if they are a desireable quality, but also feeding response, history of illness, the proportions and shape of the body, the rate of growth and the behaviors.

Breed two jumpy leopard geckos together, do nothing to influence behavior patterns(regular handling, hand feeding etc) and they will usually be more skittish than comparable offspring from a calm pair bred raised under identical conditions.

Exactly. That is where some of the difficulty lies in measuring behavior.

There is some (admittedly fairly weak) pattern recognition at play, so animals with divergent histories (it takes a lot of constant reinforcement) can show deviations. It's a question of association generally, the underlying instincts do not change but the association of various stimuli with an instinctive response can be very slightly modified.

Then there is the difficulty in providing truly identical stimulus to control groups. If the temperature is off by a degree, the light intensity has changed, the barometric pressure or humidity is different, how recently the animal has eaten, how old it is, how healthy it is, what time of day and what time of year the stimulus is applied, the nearby scents, the angle of shadows... every single factor, no matter how small it may seem, comes together to determine which of the behaviors is displayed, which instinct is triggered. It is enormously difficult to form biological control groups without lab quality conditions for the environmental control and enormous numbers of specimens so that outliers can be identified and labeled as such.

Then we get into observational bias. What one person considers skittish or defensive another might not. A great deal of the behavior we see in reptiles is something we notice most when we are interacting with them directly. We are part of what they are experiencing and our behavior influences theirs. Someone who is a little newer, a little less experienced tends to provide a different experience for the animal and oftentimes provokes different responses. Someone like Ted has worked with a lot of animals and will himself modify his approach in subtle ways so that it makes for the easiest handling. The angle of approach, the speed of the movement, the steadiness of his hands- he has learned (consciously and subconsciously) which approaches are best suited to the species and he supplies that. Someone who has two geckos that they have owned for less than a year, who might be nervous about being bitten for the first time, who is looking for personality* traits is going to themselves behave a lot differently. Changing the stimulus and changing what they observe and what they take away from that observation as a conclusion.

but if personality can be passed on almost like a dominant trait, then surely by now due to so much breeding that a calm normal must have been bred to a blizzard (or something similar) and eventually produced calm blizzards... and so on for other morphs.

Outcrossed but then crossed right back in. Most behaviors can't be looked at as simple yes/no traits, they are quantitative and qualitative and the genetic dominance and likelihood of inheritance can be a bit more complex than it is with the kind of simple recessives and incomplete dominance of most color traits. After reinforcing the behavioral traits so intensely while the morph is being established it carries a lot of weight, genetically, has a lot of strength and a high probability for continued expression. When outcrossing is infrequent, the behavioral traits associated with the new genetic material tend to be blotted out by the traits of the existing line. Continual outcrossing and selectively pairing to move away from an undesirable behavior would do the trick but behavior is generally pretty far down the checklist for most people when they choose their pairings.

And I am getting pretty close to a subject that causes me to just issue forth critical rants and thundering denunciations of anyone who doesn't do things the way I do them, or doesn't understand and value some of the same things I do when it comes to the responsibilities and goals of captive breeding... so I'll close my comments again to avoid shouting.


*I hate using that word in this context, but it is what they are doing

 

[Jordan]

It is part of why I get so uppity when I read about people not culling and (worse yet) breeding animals with negative traits simply to reproduce some aspect they like. They think they are breeding a color or a pattern, but they are actually breeding every single minute detail of that animal. Selecting stock should always take into account the total animal; color and pattern if they are a desireable quality, but also feeding response, history of illness, the proportions and shape of the body, the rate of growth and the behaviors.

Thanks for all that, interesting read. beforehand i didnt really see how the colour of a gecko could change its attitude but i guess it makes sense now.

With regards to the quote above, you mention proportions of the body? do you mean in terms of a dwarfed gecko, or mis shapen, or disfigured? or do you mean a gecko that is just a bit shorter than usual or a bit longer in length?
I ask because i have a gecko that i believe to be fully grown by now, however is about a noticable centimetre or so shorter than average, would this be considered as reason to not breed her? ... or is it just an individual difference that she isnt as long. I mean its noticable but nothing weird or unnatural. (by unnatural i mean its not a deformity)