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Colors in the wild #46913
05/23/05 11:07 AM
05/23/05 11:07 AM

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I have a question... do any of the colors we now have in captivity, (leucistic, white faced blonde, mosaic, albino, platinum, etc...) ever happen in the wild randomly. Or are these colors just mutations humans have created through "supervised" inbreeding?

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46914
05/23/05 11:49 AM
05/23/05 11:49 AM

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They are all natural variations, so they can and do happen in the wild, just not as frequently as you'll see in captivity since they aren't breed for...

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46915
05/23/05 11:56 AM
05/23/05 11:56 AM

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also gliders in the wild with different colors, especially those with more white in them, are generally prey first since they are a lot easier to spot. Thats a reason why you hardly ever see gliders in the wild other then gray or wt

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: RSXTC] #46916
05/23/05 12:07 PM
05/23/05 12:07 PM

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So you are saying some of the very strange white on white variations that Priscilla has produced that are sterile (through inbreeding I am guessing), these are seen in the wild.

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46917
05/23/05 12:13 PM
05/23/05 12:13 PM
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I am sure there is plenty of inbreeding going on in the wild, as there is nobody to tell them, hey you are brother or sister or mother and son or father and daughter and seperate them. Wouldnt be surprising to me if there were white ones, ring tails, wfb or any other color out there.


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Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46918
05/23/05 12:19 PM
05/23/05 12:19 PM

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That's true I never thought of that. But I wonder if they do know? I work at a horse breeding farm, and we have to "tease" the mares to see if they are coming into heat, in heat, or not. We just walk them by the stallions or young studs and see if they squirt urine, stand for them, wink, or pin their ears and want nothing to do with them. We have one mare Bacarra who is difficult with her heat cycles, she rarely shows signs. Once when she was in full heat, we walked her by Advocate and she would squirt, and show she was in heat. You walk her by Dandy (who was her foal from the previous year) and she would show no signs. So I wonder if she knew he was her foal or not? Do you think animals will inbreed extensively in the wild?

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46919
05/23/05 12:24 PM
05/23/05 12:24 PM
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Personally, I do not think they do know. Look at any dog or cat, they will breed with any other of its kind if the chance is there, same as rabbits, hamsters, fish....

I think when they are able to mate, they will...maybe it is a scent thing, where if they dont like the scent of one, that is one they wont breed with?

Lets see what some others have to say about it.


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Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46920
05/23/05 12:59 PM
05/23/05 12:59 PM

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What a good question! Interesting post... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumb.gif" alt="" />

Last edited by Waker; 05/23/05 01:00 PM.
Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46921
05/23/05 01:43 PM
05/23/05 01:43 PM

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I don;t think they know either.

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: RSXTC] #46922
05/23/05 02:05 PM
05/23/05 02:05 PM

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Because of the social structure that gliders have, it's not often a problem. Most of the males are not alpha males, there is only 1 alpha male to a group. And only the alpha male will breed with the females. I'm sure inbreeding does happen occasionally, but any defects are more quickly weeded out in the wild. Color variations may appear just as often in the wild, but I'm sure white variation gliders get killed much faster than grey. If gliders lived in the arctic it'd be the opposite, lol.

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46923
05/23/05 05:24 PM
05/23/05 05:24 PM

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<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/offtopic.gif" alt="" />
I think the horse incident is a bit of a rarity. I worked on an Arab farm that did a lot of line breeding to boost the percentage of Witez II bloodlines in their stock. We bred fathers to daughters, no issues. Seems i remember that it wasnt safe to breed mothers to sons. I do seem to remember breeding a brother to a sister, and know we bred a couple half-brothers to half-sisters... No one refused.

So i would say i cast my vote in that animals either dont know the difference, or dont care if they do know.

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46924
05/23/05 05:48 PM
05/23/05 05:48 PM

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After reading this i am curious... is inbreeding as unhealthy for the gliders as it is for humans- haha?... i do not plan to do it... just curious!!!

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46925
05/23/05 05:55 PM
05/23/05 05:55 PM

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I believe "controlled" inbreeding to propogate a species or a trait is alright IN REASON. But uncontrolled inbreeding will create unwanted traits.

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46926
06/18/05 06:09 PM
06/18/05 06:09 PM

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Animals do 'know' if they are related. It is how, for example, male lions know not to kill their own cubs, but will kill other males' cubs.
Inbreeding is rare in a healthy wild animal population. Inbreeding happens so frequently in captivity for survival reasons. If a female cat is only kept with her son, she will mate her son to propigate the species. However, if she has a selection of males unrelated to her, she will not mate with her son. And visa versa. Inbreeding produces genetic deformities for a reason. Nature has created a way to keep more inbred animals from furthering their degenerative gene pool by making many sterile or physicaly deformed.
Evolution has fine tuned all animals to NOT inbreed, though if the genetic pool available to an animal is slim, they will inbreed to further the species. In small groups (endangered animals) inbreeding may be the only way to further the species.

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46927
06/18/05 06:14 PM
06/18/05 06:14 PM

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Back to the original question...lol...yes these colors do exist in the wild, but not for long. If a wild pair of gliders has an albino baby for example, it probably will not live to even reach secual maturity. The parents may abandon it or it may be eaten by a predator. Gliders have developed their color over a long process of evolution. Nature has chosen their color because it has proven to be the best for hunting and hiding. Now, if they lived in a snowy region, I'm sure all gliders would be white. Or if they lived in a neon blue habitat they would be neon blue.
Color variations in every species are evolution testing the environment. If a mutation comes along where a glider is pure black, and that glider survives a long time, he will pass on his genes. If pure black turns out to have a higher survival rate than grey, eventualy all gliders will be black and grey will be a 'rare' color. Nature throws it's tests in wherever it can. Once it finds something that works, it sticks to it.

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46928
06/18/05 06:25 PM
06/18/05 06:25 PM

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you know, their are a lot of color variations out there... but i never considered the possibility of an all black glider... that'd be interesting, wouldn't it?
as far as color goes, i prefer the standard grays. i have found nothing short of amazing regarding their color. some have darker colors, wider stripes, etc. and it fascinates me

Re: Colors in the wild/inbreeding [Re: ] #46929
06/24/05 12:48 PM
06/24/05 12:48 PM

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[:"blue"]Yes, these variations can and do happen in the wild. Yes any glider with lighter markings is more likely to be killed, and thus less likely to live long enough to have joeys and pass on its colors. Yes, they happen much more frequently in captive bred pop's b/c we keep them from being killed, and they just breed more overall in captivity.

BUT, no, animals do not just "know" that a particular individual is related to them. They assume/believe based on experience, i.e. "oh, that baby was born while I was resident male, and thus smells like me and my female(s), thus it is mine". However, even in a case where the male "knows" that the female in question is his daughter/mother, he will mate with her if she goes into heat. They absolutely cannot tell if the offspring is actually the result of an "extra-pair copulation"; in other words another male (usually from an outside territory, or a "roamer") can impregnate the female when the male is "not looking", and if it's born during the dominant male's tenure, he'll raise it as his own. Many species of animals thought to be monogomous (everyone knows about Loons, right?) aren't, in the sense that the females are often visited by "cheater" males while the dominant is gone, and genetic testing shows an average of 1/4 of bird offspring to be NOT that of the resident male, despite the fact that he cares for them as his own.

Male lions kill cubs when they take over a pack from a previous male(s), as a matter of course to send the nursing females into heat and be able to bred and have their own young sooner, not because they can "tell" if they are theirs. Often, females that are pregnant at the time of the "takeover"( with the previous male's babies), deliver the cubs and they are accepted by the new (not the daddy) male. Even moms have to imprint the distinct smell of their babies when they're born to recognise them, if this doesn't happen the female will reject her own young! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

What prevents inbreeding in the wild is the average length of tenure of the dominant male (in a polygymous system, like lions and Sugar Gliders), and the fact that young males (and sometimes females) disperse at maturity; i.e. they leave and join other colonies or otherwise find their own mates.(in both poly and mono systems). I have a study (PDF) done on the breeding systems of Sugar Gliders that shows:
There is usually 1 dominant/breeding male and 1+ breeding females, with multiple non-reproducing "juvenile" (under 1 year old) young in a wild colony. It is very rare for there to be more than 1 sexually mature male in a colony, IF it happens the subordinate male is the putative son of the dominant, and does not mate, but does help care for the joeys <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/heartpump.gif" alt="" />. The average length of residence of a male is just under 2 years, this is what prevents him breeding with his daughters, by the time they are mature he has usually been kicked out by another male. Extra-pair copulations were witnessed, and show the possibility that the joeys born during a dominant's reign may not in fact be his. Sugar Gliders in the wild do NOT normally mate for life, but rather for about 2 years.

Despite all of this, inbreeding happens sometimes anyway but as a rare event causes very little problem in wild animal populations, due to underlying genetic diversity, and the fact that offspring with deleterious recessive traits die and thus don't pass on their genes.

In humans close and/or consistent inbreeding is a problem b/c our total genetic diversity as a species is actually very low, i.e. there's a much higher probability of redundancy in negative traits. However, curent work shows that while parent-child or sibling inbreeding in humans is very bad for the health of the subsequent offspring, breeding between more distant relatives (cousins) is no more likely than unrelated pairings to cause problems, due to the afformentioned lack of diversity.[/]

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46930
06/24/05 01:13 PM
06/24/05 01:13 PM

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Yet, we know now that wild lions, tigers, seals and other mammal males recognize their prodgeny. They will kill babies that are not their own.

So, I think that they know kin and may even inbreed to carry on their bloodline. Just an educated guess though and some experience with domesticated animals. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46931
06/24/05 01:21 PM
06/24/05 01:21 PM

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[:"blue"]Sadly, they do not recognise them unless they were imprinted (though sight/sound/smell) on them, it is sensory experience-based, not instinct or magic, see my last post. Sometimes animals "adopt", i.e. take on young that are not their own (that dog in CA that nursed the kitten...etc) so behavior/nature can be kind, and is always facinating!

Inbreeding is an option in the wild, but only when an unrelated mate isn't available, as it is better to reproduce with kin than not at all...[/]

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46932
06/25/05 01:57 PM
06/25/05 01:57 PM

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interesting.

*rubs chin*

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46933
06/25/05 02:40 PM
06/25/05 02:40 PM

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Elvis, though imprinting may be necessary, these animals do remember their relatives when it comes to mating. The scent and sight of their young is perminantly etched in their mind as a mechinism for them to protect their children and they will always recognize them.
Humans are no different, a man does not know his own child until he has met it, of course, but unlike humans, animals have much better senses and don't have to be taken to court for child support <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46934
06/25/05 06:00 PM
06/25/05 06:00 PM

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[:"blue"]Oestaira-I'm not really sure what your objection is... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />"they have better senses"...yes, this allows them to use scent/sound (in addition to sight, our main sense) for recognition, but it doesn't grant them magic powers of recognition.

There must be an imprinting period! There were extensive studies done on just this fact begining back in the 1960's, and every subsequent study has shown mammals and birds "recognise" those offspring/parents/relatives that they have imprinted, regardless of whether they're actually their progeny or not (see "cheater" data from my post-before-last).
This means that, while I agree they recognise the young they imprinted as "mine",

1. They will fail to recognise their own progeny if they did not imprint on them, i.e. they weren't around when they were born to see/hear/smell them.

2. They will falsely "recognise" the progeny of others if they happen to imprint on them.

Also, it has been shown you can artificially manipulate this system by doing things like a)rubbing the offspring of a lactating female all over the body of an unrelated, orphaned baby, (this is done quite often in farming, my granpa did it with his horses) to get the mother to "adopt" the outsider, and b) imprinting babies on BROOMSTICKS and puppets, which they will follow, believing it to be their parent!

3. The "recognition" of "mine" will NOT stop father from mating with daughters in heat, or sons from mating with mothers in heat.
There are no social/intellectual constraints on animals, they have no moral qualms about inbreeding (like we do) and so there must be other mechanisms to prevent inbreeding, or at least limit it, like unseating dominant males periodically and dispersal of mature young from the natal nest out into unrelated groups. There are also many groups of wild animals that regularly do inbreed, it really just depends of the specifics of the system.

I can send you really great PDF's about these types of studies, I'm not sure where you're getting the "they just know" data... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/nixweiss.gif" alt="" />[/]

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46935
06/25/05 06:32 PM
06/25/05 06:32 PM

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I wasn't debating anything you said, Elvis! I agree with you. I do, however, believe that most species will not breed with their own offspring (if they know them to be their offspring) unless they have no other way to propogate the species. This is the only point I was trying to make. I'm well aware of the necessity of 'imprinting' on both the child and the parent. Heck, somehow baby zebras instantly learn their momma's coat pattern and can pick her out on sight alone.
My primary point is that nature takes steps to prevent the inbreeding and thus tainting of evolutional lines in a given species.

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46936
06/27/05 06:40 AM
06/27/05 06:40 AM

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[:"blue"]Oh, okay <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />! That's why I was confused!

Yes, there are many steps/barriers/mechanisms that are in effect to prevent inbreeding. That's why it's so sad for animals like Cheetahs, they're endangered, and even though they're still around and captive-breeding, there's not much hope for the survival of the species b/c their gene pool is so small, and so they're all effectivly inbred and only getting more so. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crying.gif" alt="" />[/]

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46937
07/01/05 12:41 AM
07/01/05 12:41 AM

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This is not a hard fact though, sometimes in a severly closed ecosystem inbreeding will occur much more frequently. This can be seen in the fish in one pool in a cave in death valley where there is very limited space and genetic diversity is slight at best. Also some species, such as the banovo (sp.) chimps will mate with everyone, mothers to infants, sons to mothers, and even same sex, son to brother, mother to daughter. There might be other mechanisms for preventing inbreeding in the banovo (sp) species such as the female volentarily holding her egg, but there is no taboo in the animal kingdom. I agree with elvis, that genetic diversity is largly, but not wholelly a function of the time of the alpha male in social groups. Remember however that while a male is in power for 2 years he can mate with his female daughters at 4-5 months oop. Though he will probably wait until next breeding season. Inbreeding is not a bad thing in the wild. Inbreeding with a high degree of selection will tend to keep only the traits that give a maximum fitness. Predation, disease, and parasites will remove the majority of the weak and breeding selectiveness will likely prevent the remaining from passing their genes on.

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46938
07/01/05 03:21 PM
07/01/05 03:21 PM

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Ushuaia, Bonobo =)

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46939
07/03/05 04:44 AM
07/03/05 04:44 AM

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[:"blue"]While it is common for our gliders (male or female) to mature fast and breed young, in the wild they average over 1 year OOP before they're observed breeding, and this is also highly dependant on resource availability, and so while they can have multiple pregnancies in our homes, they tend not to and to have joeys only 1/year, timmed (the breeding "season" you mentioned) such that weaning coincides with lots of food being around. This is why the 2- year average for dominant males does much to limit inbreeding.

And yes, inbreeding is often not detrimental in populations that have a large gene pool to begin with. It's not the inbreeding, but the duplication of recessive "bad genes" in the offspring that makes trouble.

"Inbreeding depression" (large-scale population decline due to lack of diversity in the gene pool) is what it's called when it IS a problem, like in cheetahs. But many other species have some degree of inbreeding without much negative effect, and some animal and many plant species "self", i.e. reproduce with only their own gametes, or clonally; litterally duplicating all of their genes, and do just fine, so there's no rule that inbreeding is ALWAYS bad, but in a population like our captive gliders, that started from a small effective founder population, there is a greater chance of deleterious recessive traits, and so avoiding inbreeding is the best course.

We can see the problems of inbreeding in many pure-bred dogs and cats. They have a much higher incidence of certain illnesses and disorders due to heavy inbreeding to refine the breed originally, such that even when "out-bred" now to other unrelated purebred's these issues arise. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />[/]

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46940
07/03/05 09:15 AM
07/03/05 09:15 AM

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Marla, your posts are so interesting!! Thanks for taking the time to post on this topic so much! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Re: Colors in the wild [Re: ] #46941
07/03/05 08:13 PM
07/03/05 08:13 PM

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[:"blue"]You're so very welcome, I just hope I'm not boring everyone... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/nixweiss.gif" alt="" />[/]


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