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Posted by chrish on October 12, 2002 at 11:54:34:
In Reply to: Way to come through everyone__> more posted by A.C. on October 12, 2002 at 01:55:44:
First of all, let me confess I haven't read all of the many replies to your original post, but I have read many. I could however be coming to the table with less than 100% of the facts.
:1. Violence towards female indigos is from the animal's captive conditions. The smaller home turf coupled with stimulation makes for an angry male.
I thought we had surmised that there was absolutely no data on this and that we couldn't reach this conclusion. Until we have at least some observational data that this does/doesn't occur in the wild, this statement is unfounded. That was the perception I had from the comments below. It is valid to hypothesize that it is overstimulation that results in these exceptionally violent mating responses. If that is the case, you could test this by observing the behavior of a male who wasn't "warmed up" for several weeks by continual exposure to the female for weeks in advance. Maybe if someone had a lone male and brought in a breeder loan female and immediately put her in his cage, we could test this?
:2. Males can pass their alpha "violence" genes as in some instances discussed below.
I also don't know that we have established that this is heritable. It seems it is a psychological effect (I hesitate to use that term with animals with so little cerebral cortex!). As an analogy, consider the disturbing psychological effects we see in people who are locked in solitary confinement for extended periods. They don't pass these psychopathologies on to their children. That type of proposed inheritance pattern is termed Lamarckian inheritance, and it doesn't happen (named for the guy who had the misfortune to be an outspoken proponent of this erroneous theory). I think you may be reading to much into the original implication made the we are selecting for aggressive breeding males. We could be, but only if we preferentially breed these aggressive males and don't breed passive males. That may be a valid point. How many times have you read on one of these forums that a particular male was "a good breeder" and that "I put a female in he locked her up immediately"? We see these characteritics as positive and maybe so maybe we preferentially selecting for aggressive males (again assuming here that the behavior is heritable and not an effect of overstimulation in captivity). Particularly with potentially ophiophagous snakes like kings and cribos, we tend to like males that "stay focused" and "on task" so that we don't have leave them together for two weeks and risk one becoming a meal of the other. In that case, we could be selecting for this characteristic (assuming the biting of the females is correlated with aggressive breeding males). Just some more rambling on the topic. I have to vent here as the Field Collecting Forum has been overrun with its predictable winter puerility once again and I can hardly stand to look at it!
