captive breeding in general

[grunsven]

I don't know if and how it works but I don't like it.
At best it would give fully homozygous animals, the ultimate form of inbreeding.

 

[fishkeeper]

Their are some selective pressures in captivity that are different from the wild.

Basing off of fish and amphibians
breeding in captivity may select for animals that are...
-easy to trigger to breed(since hard to breed individuals would be eliminated)
-lose their competitive or parental behaviors(since in captive situations, as long as their is a desire to mate they are usually successful, in the wild mate selection/competition can be fierce)
-grow faster
-live shorter
-reach maturity earlier and invest more into producing eggs
-bold and exhibit few predator avoidance behaviors
-less picky in regards to prey recognition, lower or higher feeding response
-more tolerant of conditions common in captivity(ph, hardness etc.)

This is all just speculation from others/myself and a few of these could represent habituation by individuals to captivity rather than something genetic.

The problem is that we as keepers start with a limited number of animals, and ethics tell us to raise as many of them as possible. Animals too weak to survive in the wild are often helped along in captivity. On the other hand, an animal that takes care in selecting prey may not do well in captivity, although this behavior is beneficial in the wild. I think this could explain why some fish breeders report their fish fry dying of ingesting brine shrimp cysts. Their is a selection process for fish to be less picky since chances are what they bump into is food.

Also, we like to help our animals in mating. We carefully set them up in pairs, and in the case of a parental species that happens to be a poor parent, we often do the job for them. This encourages the investment into producing gametes rather than competing for mates and raising young.

So if you are raising large numbers of larvae, culling might be a good idea. If you choose to help along a certain weak individual, don't use it for breeding stock...just keep it as a pet. I doubt anyone would want to put a few dragonfly larvae in to select more closely to how nature might but this whole thread is good food for thought.

A closing thought of mine is that it is highly unlikely we will be using our animals for reintroduction, so while certain wild attributes should be preserved for our enjoyment/study, I don't think we need to sweat about a few others.