Re: DBT Colors and genetics
Hmmmmm…. Much of the courting behavior that I observe comes at the end of a long day spent with about 20 rambunctious 4th graders. As you might imagine, I come home, totally exhausted, and so I go out to my greenhouse where it stays downright tropical on even the nastiest days. My main large breeder pond fills most of the greenhouse, and I have a bridge that goes across the middle. I often lay down right on the bridge and watch all the activity going on below. I see lots of courting activity. Males are constantly checking out females, sometimes males check each other out, and occaisionally females appear to be checking out males. Breeder females usually stay away from each other , although sometimes some adult female redears chase each other around biting. Most of the males are doing this “fan dance” in front of the female (of various species), nose-to-nose, waving his long fingernails in front of her face, I think trying to hypnotize her so he can then have his way with her (seems to beat muscle-flexing and a bottle of good red wine). Almost always, the correct species are together, and when they’re not, they don’t seem to do this dancing thing for long. Anyway, one of the things they appear to be doing is checking out each others’ face patterns. My theory is that as long as there are both males and females in the pond of the same species, maybe they find each other and don’t mix up. The one hybrid I hatched was, I think, from a lone female ouachita map that, I think, got bred by a diamondback terrapin. The funny thing is that I notice the albino redears hanging out together more than I notice albino redears hanging out with nonalbinos. However, the only male redears in my pond are albinos and they mate with a bunch of odd-colored and odd-marked assortment of females (albino, pastel, hypomelanistic, hypermelanistic, ghost, and whatevers). If you could follow all of this, great! -Rick Todd Stockwell wrote: