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Evilsteve Jasonfrilled1 SHvar Evilsteve Crocdoc Pugmar |
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Evilsteve View Profile |
Had to ask
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| 06/10/06 02:04am |
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Jasonfrilled1 View Profile |
Message To: Evilsteve In reference to Message Id: 827190 Had to ask
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| 06/10/06 06:43am |
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SHvar View Profile |
Message To: Jasonfrilled1 In reference to Message Id: 827269 I dont think anyone can say for certain it works or doesnt.
Some people always get pairs, or trios, or most of the time, some get all males or all females, some in reverse trios. I believe that variables we dont understand can effect these numbers also. |
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| 06/10/06 11:46am |
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Evilsteve View Profile |
Message To: SHvar In reference to Message Id: 827421 I dont think anyone can say for certain it works or doesnt.
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| 06/10/06 12:56pm |
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Crocdoc View Profile |
Message To: Evilsteve In reference to Message Id: 827472 Well...
Here’s how it works: The probability of any monitor hatching as male or female is 50%. If you raise a lot of hatchlings in sets of two, after a while you’ll find that a good proportion of the time you’ll get one of each. In other words, if you raise 1000 hatchlings, you have a very good chance of getting 500 males and 500 females. Otherwise, there’d be a skewed sex ratio in the monitor population. Let’s look at a non-monitor example. If I tossed a coin, there’s a 50% chance of it landing either heads or tails up. If I tossed it two times in a row and repeated this several times, some times it would land tails tails, sometimes heads heads and sometimes heads tails. If I tossed it a thousand times, I’d find that it landed heads roughly 50% of the time and tails 50% of the time. Getting several heads in a row or several tails in a row would have a lower probability than getting a mixture of heads and tails, so overall I’d find that I got ’sets’ of 1 head and 1 tail more often than two heads or two tails. I might start to think that each coin toss is influenced by the one before it, but it isn’t. Tossing a head doesn’t mean the next one will definitely be a tail, there’s just a reasonable probability that it will be. Back to monitors. Let’s say you’ve been raising sets of two monitors and find that most of the time you get a male and a female. If you read too much into it, you might start thinking that you are getting pairs because they are being raised in sets of two (like the coin tosses affecting each other) rather than just because the mere probability is highest of getting one of each. Then you might start to explain away those cases you hear about in which one of your mates didn’t end up as a pair, such as the guy that got three sets of two females, or the other one that got two males. "oh, he didn’t raise them together from the start" or "oh, she didn’t give them a small enough enclosure for them to affect each other’s sexes". That sort of thing. By the way, I know many people who have got just males or just females when raising pairs and trios, they’re just not as vocal as the ones who claim that you only get pairs. On average, though, getting pairs would just seem normal and not worth writing home about. After all, if the probability overall is to get 50% of each sex, then the probability stands in your favour that you’ll get 50% of each even with a small sample size of two animals. What would be really odd is if you started to get only males or only females and this happened over and over again, to the point where you counted a thousand hatchlings over a year and found that you had 90% of one sex and 10% of the other. Then you’d have a phenomenon worth writing about. |
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| 06/10/06 08:12pm |
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Pugmar View Profile |
Message To: Crocdoc In reference to Message Id: 827921 Well...
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| 06/10/06 08:31pm |
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