Hybrid Tarantulas

Weapon-X

Arachnodemon
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hi just wondering if any of ya out there had some info on the topic, some questions though, is it legal to make hybrib t's, how is it possibly to do(like could i breed a H. Lividum with a H. Schmidti?), what would be the big problem with hybrids on the market????, i personaly think it would be awesome to breed some hybrids for myself if i could even do it , thanks---Jeff
 

Theraphosa

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hmm I don't know Jeff but I have a crazy idea :) what if you take the eggs from the female and the sperms from the male. Join it together. yeah of coz the female and male would dead if you use this method :( yeah that is my thought how to mixed breed with different tarantulas :)
Michael
 

Code Monkey

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You should look out your window for the peasants with torches and pitchforks about now...

Intentionally breeding hybrid Ts is pretty close to having sex with dead goats for the sort of reactions it will get you on these boards, and if you are looking to becoming a dealer, prepare to get cut off from many of the other breeders and suppliers if you ever did this and tried to sell them.

The problem with hybridising Ts is that it's a dead end. It's so hard to breed Ts in general, what is the point in breeding Ts that are sterile (in the case of true hybrids)? Or Ts that wind up being the mix of what should more properly be called subspecies, but are now out there ready to pollute the purebred lines for someone who doesn't realise they've got a "mutt"? Every time someone breeds a hybrid eggsac, that's a complete waste of time and energy for the hobby. The same amount of effort that it took to yield a bunch of Ts that most people will not buy for any price and are either genetic deadends or, worse, potential genetic polluters, could have yielded an eggsac from a rare species that is scarce in the hobby.

There are over 800 species of tarantulas, and more than 200 in the pet trade, there is absolutely no good reason to produce hybrids unless you're a taxonomist verifying species status. Anyone who does produce hybrids with the intention of selling them deserves to be blacklisted from the rest of the hobbyists for even the smallest of trades.
 

Code Monkey

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Originally posted by Theraposa
hmm I don't know Jeff but I have a crazy idea :) what if you take the eggs from the female and the sperms from the male. Join it together. yeah of coz the female and male would dead if you use this method :( yeah that is my thought how to mixed breed with different tarantulas :)
Michael
Actually, just like with closely related species such as horses and donkeys, many Ts of the same genus will breed and produce offspring all on their own. These offspring are usually sterile and a waste of effort to breed, but they are produced commonly by taxonomists to verify species status.

Plus, in vitro ferstilisation is impossible for Ts even of the same species given current knowledge.
 

zoobugs

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Like the rest have said, hybridizing on purpose tends to get a cold reception in the invert community(although it is widely accepted in the herp community). There is talk of the "species' Brachypelma
baumgartneri and annitha to actually be man-made as no exact founder specimen has ever been found. BTW Code, I chuckle with your "having sex with dead goats" analogy as there just may be some folks here that may not think that that is not too bad. Hell, I remember "Juicy Lucy and her trained Gila monster" very well! LOL!
 

Mojo Jojo

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That is funny. I was just thinkiing of the hybridization of tarantulas this morning. In particular, I was wondering what a Chromatapelma cyanopubecens crossed with a Cyclosternum fasciatum would look like. There has been talk of changing "Chromatapelma" to Cyclosternum. So I think that they could probably produce a sub-species that was fertile.
 

Code Monkey

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Originally posted by Big Dragonfly
That is funny. I was just thinkiing of the hybridization of tarantulas this morning. In particular, I was wondering what a Chromatapelma cyanopubecens crossed with a Cyclosternum fasciatum would look like. There has been talk of changing "Chromatapelma" to Cyclosternum. So I think that they could probably produce a sub-species that was fertile.
Actually, no they probably wouldn't.

You can cross two related "species" and get fertile offspring ONLY if they were really only subspecies to begin with. If you have two *species* closely related enough to breed, the offspring will be sterile. And, regardless, the offspring of two species or subspecies, is always a hybrid - it only gets to be subspecies if it was born from two subspecies, then it would be listed as Foospecies subfoospecies1 x subfoospeciess hybrid.

The very definition of species is that individuals can freely breed and produce fertile offspring.

EDIT: Of course this does raise a whole other issue I have with arachnid taxonomy - it steadfastly refuses to recognise subspecies preferring to grant species status regardless of what evidence there is to the contrary. Regardless, it's pretty obvious that tigerrumps and greenbottles are different species.

This also highlights another reason why hybrids are such a bad idea, the average person getting involved in them does not have even a basic understanding of the genetic principles behind it (no disrespect intended).
 
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Code Monkey

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Originally posted by zoobugs
Like the rest have said, hybridizing on purpose tends to get a cold reception in the invert community(although it is widely accepted in the herp community).
I suspect that this is why it gets such cold reception. It's a genie out of the bottle that can't be put back, but why let the same thing happen to the T hobby?

There is talk of the "species' Brachypelma
baumgartneri and annitha to actually be man-made as no exact founder specimen has ever been found.
Actually, baumgarteni is now accepted as a valid species although it was originally suspected to be a klaasi/boehmi hybrid.
I'm not sure where the idea that annitha was a hybrid ever came from. Although I've heard it repeated many times, that is not nor never was the controversy: the controversy is that it is nothing more than a color morph of B. smithi and not a separate species.
 

zoobugs

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I stand corrected. I do remember someone saying that annitha is just a color variant of smithi which makes your statement about not recognizing subspecies and making every T found a new species seem logical. The next time Rick West is at the chat, we should ask him about this.
 

Weapon-X

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re

hmmm, very educating, i was only going to keep them for myself if i did such a thing , but i lack the exsperience to even pull it off, very intresting though, still i would need sufficent info to even attempt such an experiment anyhow, know of any books out there with info?---Jeff
 

Weapon-X

Arachnodemon
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re

by the way the reason i was asking about why they were bad for the market was because i heard someone tried to sell one(not gonna say who) and a small group of people had jumped all over his case(not gonna say who that was either), was wondering why they were flipping was all..., personaly i think it would be cool to have a few hybrids, just my opinion though. if i was a dealer i would'nt try to even sell one for the fact that i would'nt want people on my case, proly just give em away,lol--Jeff
 

Phillip

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Sex with dead goats....

Is no where near as bad a screwing up the hobby with hybrids. Especially when there are so many screwed up hard to ID ones out there already. The Monkey has already covered everything I would have including Baumgarteni being legit. Founder was supposedly found in Mexico.

Oh yeah one other point. The ol I'll just keep them or give them away thing sounds good but the problem is this. Once people know you have hybrids how can they ever trust that what you are selling as a legit species is indeed pure? They can't because you have already compromised your morals once so why would you not do it again. I had someone ( who for the sake of being nice shall go un named ) send be a B auratum male which I mistakenly put with one of my female smithi quite a while back before finding out that the slight difference in appearance was from being a different species not from being male. Thank the spider gods that she didn't produce a sack as I would have had to flush it but flush it I would have done. You see this is where the ID problems come in the babies would have passed as smithi but it would have been wrong to keep them. What really sucked was that I had to put her to the side for nearly a year waiting for her to molt and couldn't try another male with her as I would not have known which male the father was. Lot's of lost time for nothing due simply to someone not knowing what they were sending me and myself not having seen a mature male auratum before. Bottom line..... hybrids suck as do mis ID ed spiders.

Phil
 
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Code Monkey

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Re: re

Originally posted by Weapon-X
if i was a dealer i would'nt try to even sell one for the fact that i would'nt want people on my case, proly just give em away,lol--Jeff
That will get people on your case all the same. IF you insist on doing your own home experiments, you need to kill every single one you aren't personally preprared to care for or it doesn't matter. The whole controversy isn't just that people will sell them, it's that they'll put them into the hobby at all.

Let's say for the sake of argument that H. lividium and H. schmidti really were just subspecies and you crossed them and got a viable sac. So, you wind up with 150 slings, keep 10 and give away 140. There is no way that you know that many people who could be trusted to never attempt to breed them or otherwise give them away themselves.

One of your bastard slings winds up being sent to Rick West or Volker when eight years down the road and two owners separated, someone is trying to determine what this unidentified "species" that they picked up at a swap is -> you just wasted an experts valuable time and possibly sent them off chasing shadows if they don't recognise it as a hybrid (and odds are they wouldn't).

Another of your bastard slings looks like an interesting color variation of H. lividium, so eight years later and three owners separated, someone who traded for it from someone else under the impression it was an H. lividium, goes ahead and breeds it with his newly emerged male and sells all of those slings to a large scale dealer as H. lividium. They all are dispersed throught the hobby as H. lividium even though nothing could be further from the truth. Alternatively, you could assume that they weren't subspecies, so no danger of completely ruining a genetic line, but instead the unknowing owner wastes his very nice male in a futile attempt to breed it with your bastard sling.

And I could cook up more scenarios, but hopefully you get the picture. Hybrid slings should never, ever be sold, given away, or dispersed in tiny bottles in the ocean. They should be treated like infectious waste. If you really can't contain your curiosity, at least have the respect of the hobby to destroy any specimens you don't personally want to assume responsibility for.
 

Phillip

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exactly.....

Couldn't have said it better myself.
Phil
 

arachnopunks

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Originally posted by Big Dragonfly
That is funny. I was just thinkiing of the hybridization of tarantulas this morning. In particular, I was wondering what a Chromatapelma cyanopubecens crossed with a Cyclosternum fasciatum would look like. There has been talk of changing "Chromatapelma" to Cyclosternum. So I think that they could probably produce a sub-species that was fertile.
Actually, you should look into the the Peruvian Cobalt Redrump- Cyclosternum sp. We had one about three years ago and thought it looked similar to a C. cyaneopubescens. They are really hard to find since they have not been classified yet. They are really nice spiders, a little nervous, but docile for the most part. We wondered about it being a cross of the above species too, but side by side they look much different. There is a photo of one at Rick West's site of an adult female:

http://www.birdspiders.com/archive/1/0209.htm
 

Code Monkey

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Originally posted by arachnopunks
Actually, you should look into the the Peruvian Cobalt Redrump- Cyclosternum sp. We had one about three years ago and thought it looked similar to a C. cyaneopubescens. They are really hard to find since they have not been classified yet. They are really nice spiders, a little nervous, but docile for the most part. We wondered about it being a cross of the above species too, but side by side they look much different. There is a photo of one at Rick West's site of an adult female:

http://www.birdspiders.com/archive/1/0209.htm
Phil, you want to take this one? I know you've got a personal stake in someone f'in with one of your favorite and nearly extinct in the hobby species...
 

Phillip

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all I have to say is this...

When Rick West puts a species on his site unless it states that it is a hybrid then it is not. He is far more of an ID expert than myself and he has recognized the cobalt redrump as being the real deal. That is good enough for me. And no they look nothing like a greenbottle nor do they behave like one. They are also a good bit smaller when grown.

And yes it is one of my faves..... cryin shame that it didn't have a large enough following to actually get it bred and keep it in the hobby. I have tried but as of yet mine has yet to make a sack. She has been bred but still nothing to get pumped up about. On the bright side she hasn't molted either so she still could.

Phil
 
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