• Responding to email notices you receive.
    **************************************************
    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

  • IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!! About the Google Adsense ads being displayed

    =====================
    Posted 08/15/2025
    =====================


    Yeah, I know. They are a pain in the butt. But they pay the bills to keep my server running. Just a fact of life, I am afraid.

    Want to get rid of them? Simple. Just become a Contributor level member or above and they will be gone. -> Please click HERE."

    Is that too much for me to ask of you to keep this site running? Well, sorry about that. I too wish I could get everything for free. But alas.....

    =====================
    Addendum: 01/10/2026
    =====================


    Google Adsense ad revenue for December, 2025 was just $30 over the cost of the lease for the server running this site. So, in effect, the money providing the incentive for me to continue running this site is coming SOLELY from the paid memberships and sponsorships here. Which honestly ain't much....

Smoothies

Status
Not open for further replies.
hy everybody, i am alessandro, the one who find out and fixed the subject of this big discussion.
this is a quick presentation because as first i would like to read all the discussion to be able to try to answer all the question. i will try to explain and answer but please be patient: my first language is italian and sometimes is not easy explain difficult things in a language that is not yours.
pogona for me is a big hobby started 15 years ago. i do not think it is important the fact that i am a biologist with a specialization in ecology and behaviour of reptiles (but there was someone who asked my qualification) because i think that the experienced reptiles breeders sometimes bring more information in than a pure biologist who study reptiles in the field. on a certain level of conservation there are always project who goes together with captive care and breeding on one side and with environmental conservation and ecology on the other side.
i will try to answer as soon as i can.
best wishes
alessandro
 
Thanks for coming Alessandro. We appreciate you taking the time to help us understand more about the silk backs, along with their origination and husbandry requirements. There are a lot of good questions, along with some stuff that has nothing to do with your line and has carried over from other issues. I will do my part to keep this productive to get the information we are looking for and that you are willing to take the time to share.
 
Great

Hello,

Thank you Alessandro for visiting here & taking the time to correctly inform us of the silkbacks. We will all be waiting to hear back from you.

Tracie
 
Hello everyone, I have been trying to refrain from chiming in before all the facts were in but personally I find the sight of a scaleless, beardless dragon utterly disgusting :angry: that is no morph. that is a mutant, mutant, mutant. that is how it will be viewed by the world. The pictures have been photoshoped. so who knows how they look? How can this be justified? to strip an animal of its shield? to give it fragile pinkie skin? to deny it the god given right to bask for hours. my beardies worship their basking areas or has that been eliminated also? what you have done Alessandro is taken away thousands of years of evolution.

biologist, zoologist,God, whatever!


JimD you disgust me. how dare you bring up someone else's departed pet in such a manner. true colors there. :reddevil:

Jack
 
Jack, you are certainly entitled to your opinion. I think this is either you really like it OR you really don't like it. While I too prefer my dragons as they are, the big concerns are how this animal came into being and husbandry issues. And some more complex genetic implications that may be harder to answer. I emailed Alessandro asking some questions and he wanted to come share his information on the thread. This has been heated and at times gone off to areas it should not have, but I think we should respectfully let the man share information that will help us to learn all we can about this. I would hate for him to be pushed away before he had a chance to give us (hopefully) a good education on silkbacks. I am not try to come down hard on you, I just want to keep this productive for the dragon community as a whole.
 
hy everybody,
first of all, bearded dragon for me is a pleasure and it will be a pleasure share info with you if there is a true interest and if there are people who want to understand. i do not want to convince anyone but i do no want to be attacked. life is really stresfull and if i need to be stressed i will call my boss.
if the discussion goes on in a polite way there will be all my effort to be as supportive as i can....otherwise i do have lot of things to do!!!!! i am invited to visit your community and i am pleased to participate but if am not wellcome i can easily go away.

second of all at the moment NOONE EXCEPT ME, knows anything about silkback, noone have silkback EXCEPT ME (and dachiu). noone have experiences about them. all the things that i ahve read are only ipothesis or thing you are aasuming they are going in this way.

to be as complete as i can i will divide the all thing in different part, genetic, husbandry, and answer to the question that there was no answer in the first two.
I AM NOT HERE TO CONVINCE ANYONE THAT THEY ARE NICE OR NOT. DE GUSTIBUS NON DISPUTANDUM EST. YOU CAN LIKE OR NOT, YOU CAN BE AGAINST MORPHING OR YOU CAN BE CON. these are your ideas not mine. please i respect yours, you respect mines.

alessandro
 
ok let's start!!!!!
Quick history.
In a clutch of normal animal one was looking different, she was a female. We have decided to keep this strange animal and see what was going on. After 1 year she was a big fat female weighting 500gr so we decided to breed her with a nice yellow male.
In the same time they appeared on the web the first leatherback produced in the usa. Confronting the pictures they were looking similar (in the fact they are similar but there are big differences but I will talk of that later). We were assuming she was the same thing. There were not definite information if this trait was genetic and how could be transmitted, they were appearing randomly and noone had tested them.
The result in the first clutch was unbelievable, out of 18 egg there was 11 animals showing the same trait. So considering the genetic law this gene was acting like a dominance incomplete or codominant. I have called few usa breeder explaining them what were the results but the result they were having breeding the usa leatherback was different.
We have kept all the babies separated them in two small group, trying to create 2 different unrelated lines: one yellow and one red.
We have suggested that if it was a codominant then there could be a super form (and this one could be visible or not: two different example could be pastel in ball python and hipo in boas). We have crossed them back and the result was 5 silkback, 11 leatherback, 6 normal looking. This is a confirmation of the codominant expression of the gene. We have decided to call them silkback.
As far as we know now the leatheback gene that we have identified is completely different from the one in the usa so we think that maybe is not right to call them in the same way.
as we cannot kkep too many animals and here is still lot of work to do (outcrossing them to enhance the genetic difference, selecting the best colour etc) we have decided to share this project with dachiu and that's it!!!!

so now this is the story. it as casual mutation like albino like pastel like jungle like hipo like every mutation that change the standard conformation of the animal.
this is NOT DUE to things like OGM, nuclear reserch or other crazy things that i have heard (heve you considered how many money should cost a research with these techniques??? what would be the interest in doing that with pet animals???)....and is not due to photoshop (but if there is any professional user of photoshop who can do the same result, i do have a contact for an important society who was looking for that kind of person....big money offered)
is not due to imbreeding because 1) i keep record of my animals up to the third generation, 2) as a responsible keeper i always cross the animals in which there is the much difference. it is for that reason that i exchange animals with other breeder because i need to keep high the genetic pool inside my colony

end of part 1
if there are any question i will be pleased o answer before i post part 2

best wishes
alessandro
 
I just want to make sure that I understand as far as the original group and breeding related dragons. So, you separated the clutch into two groups and out crossed them into two separate lines, then bred them back. How many generations were there before crossing them back? To what degree were the dragons related that were crossed back together? Thanks.

Wendy
 
First off welcome and thank you Alessandro for answering the questions. I don't post here but I have a few questions I'd like to ask the breeder himself. And that happens to be you, Ive read the whole thing and put a few thoughts into the BD.org thread but if its not a big deal could you try to answer a few questions?

Do you plan on breeding the silkbacks or just creating them using leatherbacks?

For any breeder: If you work on 2 separate lines from the same clutch for a few generations then breed them back would that still cause the same problems as inbreeding?

Are you going to sell them to people that will breed, even if you don't I doubt someone will pay high money for something like that and not breed it. It will cause many problems if this happens.

And two big questions i have

In what way is the leatherbacks you have different from USA Leatherbacks, Is it a different genetic marker or just a different way of producing them?

And I'm not trying to make this another adeno thread but heres my biggest questions

Are you aware of adenovirus? Are you aware that with the transaction with Dachiu you may have brought it into your breeding stock? And that because silkbacks frailness that it may cause tons of problems with them at Dachiu's.

Hope I didn't ask any questions you already answered. I don't breed so I don't really know genetics other then basic genetics, I'm just a concerned keeper.

Again Thank you for coming here and giving their story. It helped straighten many things out and changed my view on them. I still think they are a mutant but it seems as though you didn't deliberately breed to get them.
 
Hello

Hello Alessandro,

Thanks for giving more information on this.
My main question is don't you think you should wait a bit longer to introduce them to the US due to the fact we have a huge problem with Adenovirus over here?
I worry about them getting into the wrong hands of irresponsible people over here who don't even properly care for normal bearded dragons, let alone a more specialized dragon. What do we do when that happens?
If they are more delicate than normal bearded dragons, it could leave them vulnerable to adenovirus, or other health related problems?
Those are my primary concerns, as I know & understand that everyone likes something different, but I don't want to weaken our already weakened genepool over here anymore than it already it.
So you are saying that they are at least 3 generations apart before you breed them back in?

Tracie
 
first of all let me tell you that i will also discuss on breeding result with silk and leath but i want to make thing clear so i will do it at the end. i hope this first part is clear and answering the question we can go ahead.

Let answer some question.
Wendi: at the moment there is a certain amount of genetic distance between the animals to arrive to silkback but it is still small. As I said this is the starting point and lot of work need to be done. To see and detect how would act this gene we went over to find the result. Now that we know which is the result, the work will be to out cross several time the two lines and create a group of leather and silkback with a big “variety” of gentic. It is for that reason that I was pleased to share this project with dachiu, in this way we can work in two parallel way to achieve the best result in a shorter time. We have already planned to cross the silkback and the leatherback with different animals and then exchange again the animals in this way there should be a big increase in the genetic pool. This is the way it is done with all the genetic morph, most of the morph originates from one single animal.

To everybody: since few years ago, with pogona there was only a big work of SELECTING BREEDING. This mean that, even starting from a small group of animals showing some colour (surely not like today) that they were coming from a specific place, everybody was looking for the most coloured animals. Everybody was selecting the most coloured animals in clutch and then try again to breed them to enhance the colour. THESE PROCEEDINGS CAUSED IMBREEDING DEPRESSION, coloured bearded dragon are much more imbred than genetic morph. The difference with genetic morph is that they are all casual mutation and then there is a big work of out crossing to create a healthy viable population.

about the health of silkback: most of you are concerned with health problem with silk...but at the moment they don't seems to me different from another pogona, they aren't more vulnerable than the other. i would like to discuss this later in the husbandry section, can you keep your question for that section?

crazydude: yes silkback are mutant (if you want to call in this way all the animal which show a genetic mutation), like albinos geckoes or like leucistic ball python, or like salmon boa, or other mutation.

crazydude: let say you get 1 animal, if you cross with an unrelated animal only 50% of the genetic pool will be present in the babies, take one baby and breed with another unrelated animals, in the new born there will be 25%, if you cross again you will have 12% (with the other 88% being completely different). everytime you keep part of the genetic pool of the ancestors but you add new genes. if you consider a group of 6 (which is a small group) if for every baby you do the same hystory after 3 generation there will be a big gentic differnce. is not me who say that but reputable genetic researcher who study what is called "viable population". this is the work we have planned to do with dachiu


About ADENOVIRUS: I think I am here to try to help everybody understand the background of silkback, adenovirus is another question which concern the health of our animals. I have made some discussion with reputable vet and I do have my opinion but I do not think this is the subject of this thread. if someone is interested in my opiion I will put it in the right thread. Is not that I do not want to answer but I think it would only create confusion in such a difficult and big discussion.

always available for more question, i am wriing down the details of the husbandry....it take time to be understandable....sorry for that
alessandro
 
to the responsable f the forum:
as is not my language i always do lot of mistake, and i see them always after i put my replay on. how can i edit my messages???
thank for the answer
alessandro
 
Alessandro,thank you for taking the time to explain all this to us even though the last 42 pages have been kinda harsh.I think alot of the frustrations have to do with Dachiu's character, many people have lost faith in them because of the adenovirus situation and their attempt to cover it up in order to continue making money. Like you said though, that discussion is not for this thread but I just wanted to help you understand some of the anger here. As for the editing,I may be wrong but i think you have to be a member of a certain amount of posts or you need to be a moderater to edit. You are doing great with your posts :) When you said " there is a certain amount of genetic distance between the animals to arrive to silkback but it is still small" how much of a distance do you mean? I am concerned about this statement. Thank you.
 
I'm sorry if the word mutant sounds mean, I guess I just had poor word choice. I was referring to the fact its a genetic mutation. I guess I just don't consider Albino geckos or Leuscistic ball pythons or salmon boas a mutation because it doesn't affect there daily life which in a way it affects silkbacks. I'm looking forward to hearing about there husbandry.

And I'm sorry you had to come into a hostile enviorment, as puppytoes said Dachiu's Character has more than came into question multiple times.

Do you mind if i ask a few more questions that relates to husbandry?

With less basking time do they ever not digest there food?
Have you ever had MBD or calcium problems with silkbacks?
If you try to breed them or if you have do you worry about their neck tearing?


Thanks for your time and effort coming over here and helping us understand silkback dragons and what you have done to create them
 
hy everybody

puppytoes: as i told you there is a distance but i am aware that it is a small distance...it's a new thing and i do have 4 generation now. i have tested the genetic of silkback in the third generation of leatherback. but as i said before this was done to test it!!!!! now, as a responsible keeper, i am outcrossing them (and dachiu is doing the same things) to create lines which are completely unrelated to their progenitors. i understand your concerning but you need to give me time....this year each of the leatherback is crossed with a different animal...they are already healthy animals and we are working to introduce in them the most variable genetic. if you ahve any suggestion to improve more their genetic pool i will be glad to know it.

"I'm sorry if the word mutant sounds mean, I guess I just had poor word choice. I was referring to the fact its a genetic mutation. I guess I just don't consider Albino geckos or Leuscistic ball pythons or salmon boas a mutation because it doesn't affect there daily life which in a way it affects silkbacks"

crazydude, first of all i think that genetic mutation like albino gecko will affect their lifestyle but it is really reduced to our eyes because they do not need a large amount of uvb.....but....what about with albino iguana or albino pogona??? as far as i know there is still lot of work to do to say that this situation does not affect their life style. if we consider ball python some of the mutation (starting from albino's) lead to animals with a poor growth rate, do you think these mutation doesn't affect their daily life????


"With less basking time do they ever not digest there food?
Have you ever had MBD or calcium problems with silkbacks?
If you try to breed them or if you have do you worry about their neck tearing?"

crazidude you are claiming things that they are not true... do i said they have less basking time??? as i said i will explain exactly everything inside the husbandry section but i can anticipate that you will not find so many differences comparing to the care of a normal bearded dragon.

always available
alessandro
 
alessandro said:
About ADENOVIRUS: I think I am here to try to help everybody understand the background of silkback, adenovirus is another question which concern the health of our animals. I have made some discussion with reputable vet and I do have my opinion but I do not think this is the subject of this thread. if someone is interested in my opiion I will put it in the right thread. Is not that I do not want to answer but I think it would only create confusion in such a difficult and big discussion.
Click to expand...

Yes, adenovirus is a heated subject here in the states. It would be interesting to hear your views on the subject. Maybe when you are done with this thread and have answered all the questions, you could tell us what is happening with AV in your part of the world and how you breeders are approaching the issue. Thank you so much for taking the time to educate us.
 
Alessandro, are there any specific genetic defects or variables that could cause problems with silkbacks? Especially because there was a certain amount of inbreeding to create the line? I guess I am trying find out if with this mutation there could be inherent genetic problems or difficulties. Thank you.

Wendy
 
wendi: at the moment they do not have any problem they grow well and they do not show any sign of problem....i cannot tell you more because the animal are really well and i do not find any problem. all the leatherback produce viable eggs with a rate of 20 (media) in each clutch. for the european standard is the standard. same thing with silkback.
alessandro
 
Thanks. I hope that it holds true and remains a healthy line for you. I have one more question. Have you seen any problems sometimes associated with breeding closely related dragons, like crooked tails or spines? I am just curious.

Wendy
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top