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From: Chris Graseck@LUDL on 08/31/98 01:20 PM
To: killietalk at aka_org
cc:
Subject:
Brothers and sisters
are crossed, or parents and their progeny. Or desirable traits are
intentionally selected by the breeder. As a result, many tropical fish
populations in the industry are not the same fish as their wild
counterparts.
This is all just my theory so please don't anyone take offense.
Whether or not captive fish are selectively bred, they will gradually
change with every generation. Captive fish are in no way, subject
to the same environmental pressures that initially shaped the
physical and behavioral characteristics or their wild ancestors.
Our aquariums have their own set of environmental pressures and
these pressures gradually select those fish which can best cope
with them. Because of this, fish that have been bred in captivity
for many generations will be better suited to the aquarium
environment that they were artificially selected for than the
natural environment that they came from. You can have all kinds of
collecting information tagged onto the end of the fishes name but
after many generations the captive strain and the wild strain will
not be the same. That's simply the way natural selection works.
The best suited to survive in a given environment will. The rest
will be someone else's dinner.
This doesn't excuse us from doing out best to maintain the individual
nature of killies from specific locations but we should all realize
that no line is without variation and that the longer we keep a
given line in an aquarium the further it will be from its wild
relatives.
Christopher Graseck
C/O Ludl Electronic Products
171 Brady Avenue, Hawthorne NY 10532
cgraseck at ludl_com