pleco loan service networking idea?

[Proteus]

Due to the flipping impossibility of me getting any female L260s its much more tougher than getting a L046 mature bred pair- it looks like its on its way anyhow but catfish/pleco and whatnot keepers can unite.......

I was wondering about pleco keepers getting together as several of us only have one or two of hard to attain species, or have a specific variant in a species but is hard to try to match to other variant.... and network together and give their plecos to successful breeders to bred them and somehow make the prices be kept down and the more people that has them the more they're going to be bred? of course there would be certain criteria before anybody can join and has to be a local networking etc. I know fish die/ so many screwups can happen but if there are group of hobbyists that's dead serious on the fish this should be able to work as we all have limited tanks/resources. We also can be able to do lineage projects to avoid inbreeding as I'm starting to realize we would probably need to do that to avoid too many inbreeding.

The fee would be just the share of the pleco fry that comes out of the mating and success of rearing the fry. It would be up to the breeder (the one that is housing both fish) and the loaner what terms and what would be the length. This is a great idea when some of us have big pleco that only can get along with non-pleco like the L25 that I'm seeing a wide demand of if someone had the opposite gender and had them bred then go back their separate ways this would be a great resource as well too.

Am I out of my mind?

[Gordon C. Snelling]

Not out of your mind especially. However breeding loans are very good ways to ruin friendships. You would want to have every detail of the loan agreement spelled out paper with signatures and the whole bit. Breeding loans are common in the reptile world and almost always cause more grief than they are worth.

[Proteus]

wow. maybe this is just too complicated for anybody to tackle as ruining networking isn't the way to go as bridges might be burnt faster than anybody can build them. Thanks for your input.


Perhaps let's just leave it to the zoos.

[apistomaster]

The best and perhaps most difficult way of acquiring fish like L260, for example, would be to try to induce owners of the individual and isolated fish to sell them so you could integrate them into potential breeding groups. What you are proposing is not likely to get breeding stock from other breeders and you may have to wait for enough other breeders to finally have F1 fish they are willing to sell or exchange.
Gordon is correct in his analysis in that we hobbyist breeders will not be inclined to loan out our limited stocks of breeders and if we did there would be great resentment over any unfortunate losses.
Networking would still be well worthwhile as unforeseen circumstances do arise where something happens that forces us out of our hobby like serious illness, foreclosures and the like. Having some desirable species you breed to offer as trade for other bred species should enhance the chances of eventually getting the species you desire. I plan to do that sort of thing once i have more than 30 F1 L260 accumulated for my own long term breeding program from 3 unrelated wild breeding pairs. They just don't spawn often and I get about 10 survivors per spawn although I have lost a number of the 20 I had by allowing them to share tank space with a number of bolder L134 juveniles who out competed the L260 for food. Even breeders make mistakes like that through trial and error.
I think within a couple more years the availability of these fish between other breeders will improve. It is going to take time for hobbyist breeders to be able to begin supplanting the relatively sudden loss of access of the banned Brazilian Hypancistrus market and establish exchanges with others for unrelated fish.