Breeding wolf spiders

[wolfs79]

Would breeding a pair of wolf spiders from the same sac be bad I have never tried it yet unfortunate my males and females are from same mother

 

[Ungoliant]

Would breeding a pair of wolf spiders from the same sac be bad I have never tried it yet unfortunate my males and females are from same mother

While a single instance of inbreeding is probably not that harmful, I would not recommend deliberately breeding two siblings. (That male and female spiders often mature at different rates is thought to be a mechanism for reducing the odds of siblings mating in the wild. There's probably a reason that developed.)

 

[Wolfspidurguy]

While a single instance of inbreeding is probably not that harmful, I would not recommend deliberately breeding two siblings. (That male and female spiders often mature at different rates is thought to be a mechanism for reducing the odds of siblings mating in the wild. There's probably a reason that developed.)

is spider inbreeding a problomatic thing?

 

[Ungoliant]

is spider inbreeding a problomatic thing?

We know generally that prolonged inbreeding often has detrimental effects on animals. This is why so many animals have reproductive/dispersal strategies that help to reduce inbreeding. (For example, as a I mentioned above, male spiders generally mature faster than their female sac-mates.)

It's unclear what effect inbreeding has on spiders or how many generations of inbreeding they can tolerate before things go awry. (There are some tarantula species whose domestic stock are all descended from a small number of imported spiders, and no one has noticed any problems that can be clearly attributed to inbreeding.)

While they are not spiders, I have noticed with my mealworms that after several generations of inbreeding, I started seeing a lot of bad molts. Adding a cup of fresh mealworms seems to have solved this problem. @EulersK noticed a similar issue with his dubia colony, which was resolved by adding new males.

Here's some anecdotal evidence. About a year ago, my dubia colony started going downhill. Males maturing with no wings, dwarfism running rampant, females with no antenna, and so on. That colony of tens of thousands is the result of two breeding pairs that I got for free a few years ago. The inbreeding started to catch up. Luckily, a small influx of a few dozen males every year keeps those issues at bay. It doesn't take much to mix up the genetic pool, is what I'm saying.