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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eds" data-source="post: 732262" data-attributes="member: 114414">In many, many species, inbreeding is only an issue if you have deleterious genes in the mix. As stated earlier, start with good plants, select rigourously and you can breed a homozygous population without those negative genes.A lot of inbreeding depression is suspected to be down to recessive genes being expressed through crossing siblings. Weed those out and you can have a very inbred, strongly growing population.  Think of all the album forms in captivity compared to the wild - these will all be recessive genes in the wild population and very rarely expressed in an outcrossing population.Also, with species collected from the wild, the Founder Effect can lead to a very different gene pool being established in captivity to that of the wild population and that is rarely a good thing.Each species has a different tolerance to inbreeding and some simply can't take it and need to be regularly outcrossed but it is amazing how inbred even some complex mammals can be and still be very healthy. Other animals (such as humans) cannot even cope with a few generations of inbreeding (as the royal families of Europe proved around the turn of the century).There are lots of Paphs formed from sibling crosses and many make superb plants. I think the bit that can skew the opinion of line breeding is when runts are kept and sold (due to their worth) instead of being culled. In many line breeding examples of highly selected species (guppies, goldfish) only the very best are kept or sold on and I don't think this always happens with Paphs or, for example, dogs as each plant, even those with negative mutations are worth too much to cull.</blockquote>

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