Honestly, this sort of shit bugs me so much. As someone who strongly promotes responsible captive breeding, seeing big parks get away with treating their breeding stock so poorly and bungling their genetic diversity is absolutely soul destroying. There are animal species out there who survive only in captivity, and for whom inbreeding is their sole option for survival. Pairings are meticulously planned to keep lines as separate as possible, in a desperate bid to stave off extinction.
If you’re not even five gens in yet, have unrelated, breeding-age animals in the genepool and yet you’re already inbreeding, guess what, you failed. Your breeding programme is a sham and you ought to be ashamed of yourself and the damage you’ve done. You’ll slam people who inbreed for white tigers all day, but when a marine park does it, you…suddenly can’t read somehow? Or you change your tune just because? Seriously what is it, please explain to me how this shit’s okay because I literally do not understand.
I guess I’ll explain?? There’s a difference between systematic inbreeding happening over several generations resulting in significant genetic deformities to produce an aesthetically pleasing animal and incidental low level inbreeding to sustain a captive population. All cases of inbreeding in captive orcas, except for Adan and Vicky, have been confirmed accidents. Additionally Adan and Vicky were the result of low level inbreeding, the type that if far spread within a population and assuming their relatives are unrelated, is not irresponsible.
I’ve wondered why captive orcas didn’t seem to be a part of the SSP and I’m assuming it’s because they’re breeding animals from several populations. I’m not entirely sure though.
Yeah, there were mistakes made in the breeding program, mainly the overrepresentation of certain animals, but 4/51 successful calves hardly seems like a failed program to me.
You keep missing the point and I’m honestly not sure if you’re doing it on purpose or just being obtuse. The fact of the matter remains that at such an early stage of a breeding program, there should not be any inbred animals being produced. Nalani was a true accident, a complete anomaly outside pretty much everything we know about her species. But the other three? What did these parks expect would happen if they kept sexually mature animals together? Why weren’t Kohana and Wikie on birth control, or separated from the males when cycling? Seaworld did that for Takara and Unna for years, why didn’t LP and MLF do the same for their animals? Sounds pretty negligent to me.
They’re not a part of the SSP because the SSP is generally geared towards threatened or endangered species and/or populations. Captive orcas have been bred not only across populations, but across ecotypes. There’s also a heavy slant towards reintroduction, something that captive cetaceans are uniquely unsuited for thanks to spending their lives in a near-sterile environment where they are encouraged to be as near to humans as possible. That and the busted up teeth.
4/51 animals is nearly 8% of the current population. That’s an awful lot for a captive population that’s still heavily reliant on wild caught animals. And it’s not a case of ‘mistakes were made’, it’s a case of ‘mistakes were made repeatedly and we’ve learned nothing from them’. These parks no longer seem to have an interest in preserving genetic diversity at all. Look at Amaya - she’s related to almost every other Seaworld whale. Aside from Tilikum and his calves, who certainly don’t need any more representation in the genepool, every other male she could breed with to produce a normal calf lives thousands of miles away. If SW hadn;t been in such a rush to breed Kalia as soon as possible, maybe they’d have thought it through and AI’d her with Bingo or Kshamenk or waited until Earth was old enough. That way, any calves would’ve had a decent shot of being genetically valuable. And if you’re producing animals that aren’t genetically valuable you’re not doing a very good job.
The captive orca breeding program has been a mess from the beginning. In any half-decent attempt at producing a diverse genepool, a great deal of care is taken to preserve separate lines - such as by exclusively breeding particular pairs. If you only breed A+B to get C, and only breed X+Y to get Z, then you can pretty much guarantee C+Z’s offspring would be unrelated. But if you breed B to A, Y, J, F, G etc. then things start to get muddled. At first, emphasis should always be on only breeding wild-caught to wild-caught. This gives captive born animals a chance to reach full adulthood while also gaining the skills necessary for rearing their own young successfully. Breeding between different generations is generally a huge no, because you want to preserve each separate line as much as possible. You don’t go into this just to churn out as many babies as possible in the shortest possible time frame, that’s called irresponsible breeding, and it’s exactly what Seaworld did.
As an aside, inbreeding is almost always used as a last resort, and suggesting a mating that will result in inbred offspring requires a great deal of planning and debate before any decisions are made. A good deal of work is put in to weigh up the options, and when it does occur, it’s usually something like breeding animals who are fifth cousins or third cousins twice removed, or something equally remote. It is not half-sibling matings or uncle/niece matings unless the species is in truly dire straits.
TL;DR version: stop making excuses for these fuck-ups. It’s not okay, particularly when it is the genetic health of the entire captive population that is at stake.
