Aberrant and hybrid animals

[fishguy194]

I was looking through some of the posts and have seen many different hybrids and aberrant animals that people go gaga over. However, with so much advancement coming up in the aquaculture community, aberrant animals are popping up all the time. If you look at the ocellaris clownfish as an example, there are plenty of varieties now being bred in large quantities, whereas, if these aberrants came from the wild they would probably be sold at an outstanding price.

I mention this because I have a theory and was wondering if anyone else agrees with me: are aberrant animals common but are "culled" in their natural environment. And as we start breeding more and more species, will we see that aberrant animals are not rare "genetically" but are rare because they are simply eaten before they settle onto the reef?

I have a prime example here:
http://risingtideconservation.blogspot.com/2012/03/market-size-semicircle-angelfish.html

It's the first time a Koran Angel has been raised to metamorphosis in captivity, but if you look at those animals, most of their stripes do not match any of their wild counterparts! Which then raises more questions like: why are wild Koran's selected to have that particular stripe pattern? What is the driving force behind it? The same can be applied to almost every species of tank bred clownfish. Most animals in a single spawn will be "misbarred" with the exception of a few.

Why do wild ocellaris clowns have 3 complete bars? Do 3 bars provide better camouflage than 1 or 2?

Final thought / question: Once more animals are cultured in captivity, will these 1 in a million wild aberrants become as common as going to petco and picking out which color betta matches the kitchen counter? I believe the answer will be yes. Personally, I am very excited to see the future of our hobby because I really REALLY want a chrysurus imperator hybrid! I just don't want to be paying the same price as a mercedes for one!

 

[disc1]

Sure. Look at any species that mankind has domesticated. It happens every time. Take dogs for instance. There are a great number of breeds that simply could not possibly survive in the wild. Humans have bred them for completely ornamental qualities.

It's all about selective breeding. Once humans get involved with selecting breeding partners, creating any number of variants becomes trivial. Even if an individual in nature survives with some aberration or anomaly, what are the chances that it would then find and breed with another with the same anomaly? But humans don't need to do that. We only need one individual with the trait.

The final piece of the puzzle is inbreeding. By intentionally selecting breeding partners that are closely related, you can gradually distill down to all of the different characteristics of the parents. You don't even need to find any naturally occurring abnormality. Through inbreeding, you can find recessive traits that wouldn't have shown up very often naturally.

It is likewise possible to keep or eliminate any particular traits by only keeping offspring that came from parents who produced the trait and whose offspring also produce only offspring with the trait when inbred. The science gets complicated but has been known for hundreds of years. It all comes down to selecting homozygous offspring from heterozygous individuals based on inbreeding of their inbred offspring. That and genetic dominance. Once you have a pair of homozygotes, you can make as many copies of an animal with a particular trait as breeding will allow.

It all depends on how fast you can turn over generations and how large one clutch of offspring is for that particular species. Since fish have such a large number of fry, it is possible to purify a strain in just a few generations. Since they come to sexual maturity fairly quickly, it is possible to do that in a short period of time.

 

[ssgtgonzo]

Another point for your analysis, say a wild abberant makes it to adulthood...whats to say that the opposite sex will select it to breed with? The abberation may be seen as a weakness, therefore a more fit partner would be selected. Interesting topic.