jdheff1982 wrote:How can we stop this if it occurs naturally ? And why only the blue-tongues? Don't the other animals of this world deserve a chance, too? I do understand keeping animals pure to retain their originals; however, if nature will's the animals to breed outside their circle, there is nothing we can do about it. But that's not my point here. Someone has pointed out that breeding hybrids is a meaningless project; however, what if the breeding produces favorable traits? Wouldn't we want that? No matter what they look like on the outside, they will always be the blue-tongue skink on the inside. That goes for people, too. All the different peoples of the Earth have cross-bred with one another; but that doesn't change the fact we are still very much human on the inside. I'm a mixture of Irish, Spanish, English, Hebrew, and possible others; yet, I'm still considered acceptable. Should I just stop the gene train here and not consider fornication because I'm a hybrid? Some of you might say "yes" after reading this, lol.
i think you're comparison to human breeding is fundamentally flawed. we're not talking about interbreeding different "races" or "ethnicities" of skinks. we're talking about interbreeding different species. regardless of race, ethnicity, hair color, skin color, height, or whatever different physical traits different people may have, we all belong to the same species, Home sapiens. and last i checked, it was illegal for a Homo sapiens to breed (or attempt to breed) with a non-Homo sapiens.
i know there is some debate about which types of skinks should be considered their own species or subspecies, but until that gets sorted out definitively by taxonomists, we should err on the side of maintaining purity at the species level. it's not the same as interbreeding different breeds of dogs, or different morphs of ball pythons. a poodle and a labrador retriever may look and behave in very different ways, but they are still the same species. every different morph of ball python is still a Python regius. those who choose to maintain the "purity" of a breed or morph by selective breeding for that breed or morph, with all the attendant advantages and disadvantages that entails, are engaging in an entirely different practice, a more extreme selective breeding that really has nothing in common with maintaining species purity; it's more akin to the old royal practice of maintaing pure royal bloodlines. when different species interbreed, there are occasional "successes" such as mules, but more often it leads to animals that are weaker, less robust than pure-species individuals, and that may often be sterile. even most mules, which are generally healthy and useful (at least to us), are infertile. interspecies breeding does not typically lead to the kind of advantages that you are attributing to intraspecies breeding of animals of the same species that exhibit different physical traits. there's a big difference between maintaing the robustness of a species gene pool by breeding different hereditary lines, vs. polluting the gene pool with genes from a different species.
as for other species of animals, i also collect tarantulas, and i can tell you the idea of hybridization in tarantulas is a BIG NO-NO. there are a lot of species in the tarantula world that have been contaminated by hybridization and weakened as a result. most T's will not breed with a different species, but in the rare cases where it does occur, it creates huge problems in identifying and breeding those species. it's very possible for certain species to die out and go extinct as a result of weakening those species genetics through hybridization. on a larger scale, the zoological community as a whole strives to maintain genetic diversity and purity by avoiding both inbreeding and interbreeding/hybridization. it's standard procedure to keep separate species separate to prevent interbreeding. that's the reason, for example, that many zoos have banned the breeding of Ligers (lion/tiger hybrids).
i have to say, it's really surprising to me to see hybridization in skinks taken so lightly, when it's generally considered so negatively in other areas of herpetology, at least among the ones i've experienced. maybe it's because there is more natural hybridization in the wild skink population, or the increased probability of producing fertile hybrids, i don't know. yes, hybridization takes place naturally, including among some skink species. but we are not in a natural situation when we breed animals. hybridization is part of the natural process of evolution, but that's a long-term process that involves a lot of mistakes and unhealthy animals along the way. it takes a lot of hybridization attempts over a VERY long time to produce a new species (along with an ecosystem that favors the new "hybrid" species and that allows that new species to become isolated to prevent further hybridization and develop independently into a true species). that's not something we humans are really capable of replicating. human-bred hybrids are destined only to either die out naturally or to go back into the gene pool and further dilute it for the actual true species that those hybrids were developed from.
