Carpet breeding ethics

[Dr.Oviparous]

What is your opinion on Carpet Python breeding ethics? Should Coastals be bred with jungles be bred with diamonds...........? Since "inter-carpet" breeding does occasionally happen naturally in the wild, should it happen in captivity? I for one am very against mixing boa species. IMO even different locales of BCI should not be bred together. What is your opinion on Morelia Spilota? -Juggalo
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	Boa Constrictor Imperator Boa Constrictor (Boa constrictor imperator). Most common is the Colombian Boa.

	In My Opinon IMO = In My Opinion and IMHO = In My Honest Opinion

[eddie]

I look at it like this, stick with the way you feel about not mixing, because in the end it leads to stronger stock, more production and less bad eggs/births.
And usually tends to give out better looking offspring.
[addsig]

Yeah, I'm pretty much in the non-mixing camp on this one. For some reason, I particularly despise the diamond x carpet cross, but then I'm heavily biased to Diamond Pythons. I think that's because they are very difficult to actually keep alive for 10 years, and breeding them is a little more challenging that other Morelia (excluding arboreal species)
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	Arboreal Arboreal is a word meaning "related to or resembling trees". Its meaning comes from the Latin arbor, meaning tree.<br> In biology, an arboreal animal is one which inhabits or spends large amounts of time in trees or bushes.

[bensnacks]

Really is up to the individual ,personally I wouldn't .
I think it does muddy the gene pool.
If it is done I think it should be kept 'natural',
i.e. not mixing spilota spilota w/ cheynei or imbricata w/variegata
or bredli w/ mcdowelli.
But like I said it's the individuals decision [img]modules/Forum/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img] .
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[najaboy]

I'm definitely a purist on this one. As with any Aussie python, the gene pool available to us is extremely limited. No sense in contaminating it, and limiting it even moreso.
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[bensnacks]

If your still interested Jugg's I just read this from,
'Pythons of Australia: A natural history' (Torr 2000)

"Apparent hybrids between diamond pythons and carpet pythons have
been observed in areas where the ranges intersect.Whether they represent
true hybrids or are part of a steep intergrade between the different forms is
unknown.
The other species found to hybridise in captivity have not been observed to
do so in the wild, suggesting that effective reproductive isolating mechanisms
exist."

So maybe coastals and jungles or SthWesterns and Murray/Darlings aren't doing it
in the wild like we thought . [img]modules/Forum/images/smiles/icon_confused.gif[/img]
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[telefrag]

I wouldnt breed them together.

But......

Are you 100% sure that carpets you have are 100% of what they were bought as?

There are a lot of them that made it into the pet trade early on that were already intergrades and hybrids, so its possible they may already be.

You can definately see a difference,
I purchased a female Coastal carpet many years ago, (from a very reliable,reputable breeder)
and over the 7 years I had it, it never got larger than 5 feet and always had more yellow then the coastal male I had bought from a dealer 2 years prior, and he was nearly 8 ft long, and very dull in comparison.

and that is not the only example of my "hypothesis" that I have seen.
whether some cheynei got mixed in, or maybe its parents had some imbricatta in them, who knows, but when you looked at the two side by side, they definately looked different.


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