unattractive mutations?

i think it is beautiful...of course i think all birds are beautiful


dusty

henpecked wrote:

I'm truly worried about several subspecies of amazons, like the Panamas.I don't see birds being reintroduced because of loss of habitat but i'd hate to see them disappear. Myself, i won't hybridize sub species and hate to see any breeder bird lost from the shrinking gene pool.

Been mulling over this. Bear in mind that I am not a geneticist and I don't play one on TV...

I'm not in favor of losing subspecies by indiscriminate breeding by any means, but I do think the consequences of "losing" a subspecies are somewhat less dire. One thing that occurs to me is that when a subspecies gets absorbed into the overall gene pool of the species, the genetic material isn't actually lost. In theory, it should be possible by selective breeding to recover the subspecies, although that would not be an easy task, or something that would happen in a short period of time unless the traits are largely dominant. But selective breeding got us the Great Dane and the Chihuahua out of the same species, getting a Panama back out of the appropriate Amazon species pool is likely possible since it presumably came from there in the first place. When a bird is crossed outside the species the genetic material is truly lost because the offspring can't breed. It would not be straightforward to re-create a species. In fact, I don't think it has been done, even in plants, although I'm not well read up on that.

Although... I assume we bank as much variety of DNA as we can from endangered species. So it may even be possible to recover those in the not too distant future. We aren't quite at Jurassic Park yet, but there are cloned horses standing at stud now. Cloning extinct species for which we have a decent variety of genetic material is probably just around the corner. Cloning does not reproduce an animal, but it does create essentially an identical twin which is reproductively exactly equivalent.