Quote Originally Posted by ConcinnusMan View Post
And there you go. If the albino checkered got away what can he do to ensure that none of these babies get loose? It's a good thing he found her before she had babies.

And that brings up another question. Obviously just one purebred non-native garter getting loose where other garters occur is apparently enough to get hybrids in the wild. So the question then is, is it a good idea to keep non natives at all? What if they get loose and hybridize with the locals? Would it really have any impact on the local genepool or would dilution and natural selection take care of eliminating the impact or even make it a positive impact? Look what happened with human beings. We interbred with neanderthals but natural selection and dilution made it so that the impact didn't really change us but it did add immunity to diseases. We now only carry the "good" Neanderthal genes. The ones that made us better off, not worse off.

I guess what I'm trying to say , is it even possible for a few escaped snakes/hybrids to have anything but a very temporary and insignificant negative impact? Wouldn't natural selection "fix" the gene pool eventually anyway?
I was talking to Steve on Skype about this before. It would be unlikely for a snake to escape and get into another snake's cage* and hybridize, so your collection would be safe, but if it got out in the wild, wouldn't a hybrid cause just as much as, if not less damage than another purebred species/subspecies getting loose?

*Although there have been 3 instances where garters of mine had escaped and I had found them on top of my female eastern's cage. All but 1 escapees have been found on her cage after I caught her. She's like the Megan Fox of garters, she attracts garters and ribbons!