justindh1
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I keep a few Enigmas and I would love to perform breeding experiments to verify a couple things without some of the emotional biases I see being attached to this, but it's a matter of resourcing and patience. Anything I do potentially takes away from something else. In this case, project space and money. I am sure that everyone else faces the same thing. I'd have to add another rack or set of racks, more Enigmas, more Wild Types, more feeders, and more electronics. This would mean it would draw away from the projects which are more useful/interesting to me, too. I'd also be producing more geckos, which I would have to find more homes for.
If you want, feel free to do the experiments.
Get 2 Enigma males, 2 Wild Type males, 10 Enigma females, and 10 Wild Type females. Cross each Enigma male to 5 out of each female group. Record the number of eggs laid from each female and, if you can, record the number of eggs that seemed to have been resorbed as well as ovulation cycles that did not appear to give rise to eggs despite mating. Incubate all eggs for female at perhaps 81-82F with a decent digital incubator that has low fluctuation. Record all infertile eggs, eggs that were fertile but failed to develop, eggs that developed but died at/near term, and hatchlings. Obviously, record the morphs. Now, raise all of the females that were born of Enigma dams separately and all of the females that were born of Wild Type dams seperately.
When large enough to breed safely, breed each of the 2 Wild Type males to half of the 2 female Enigma groups. Record the same data categories as last time. Incubate the same way as last time. See the results. Do the math. See what happened from WT x (Enigma x Enigma). See what happened from WT x (Enigma x WT). Try to align the numbers with known behaviors of dominant genes, since we already know some form of dominance is at play.
Present results to the community on a number of fora.
Now scramble to try to place the many geckos you have spent and you're now spending a bunch of money on by doing this experiment.
Honestly, the above experiment isn't even necessarily enough. Maybe ten times that volume would start giving you more statistically reliable data. So either use ten times that volume or enlist nine other willing leopard gecko breeders to perform the exact same experiment in the same way.
Unless you or someone else is willing to do the above, well, you're not really offering a solution to the so-called "problem".
Do you think I or anyone else is willing to give up their dedicated projects in order to accomodate what it takes to provide this type and volume of data? Do you think most breeders will honestly do the math and not see what they want to see before the data is tortured until it confesses? Doubtful on both counts. Especially the first, due to cost. The latter would be due to excitement and ego.
There you have it.
So your sayin that people don't want to do this because of having better things to do, better project and better things to spend money on! If i had a hand in the start of the enigma then hell ya i would to make myself feel better for letting this gecko get out with problems. The breeders in the beginning didn't have better things to do then make money off this gecko so why don't they do it. They made the money off everyone spending their hard earned cash in the beginning and then gettin a defected morph. Do you think that they deserved that? Do you think in the beginning that the breeders told everyone that this geckos has problems, i doubt it! Is it kind of weird that after the market has started to go down then people starts to test them once the defects were more known and everyone started talking about it.