Furcifer labordi

[CCT Reptiles]

Hey this is kind of random but I’ve been thinking abt labordi the past few days & have been wondering if there’s any new news of them? Is anyone keeping them in captivity or having success with breeding Ik there’s no quota but there’s no quota for a lot of the animals we have so thought it could be a possibility.

 

[JenRM]

I've ALSO been thinking about them the past few weeks!

There's this old thread on them which I'm hesitant to necro-post to without building some local reputation.

I got interested in them based on searching for a good model organism for life extension research.

They might be the shortest lived (1) reptiliomorphs (includes humans but excludes frogs) that are (2) a good size to be easily handled in a lab that (3) has one of the naturally shortest life spans.

They typically spend most of their metabolically active "life" growing in an egg, and die only a few months after hatching, growing, and laying eggs... but in nature they can actually sometimes live to have a SECOND breeding cycle! (So there is natural variability to work with, based on raising practices and captive breeding.)

Also, they go from "hatching to sexual maturity" in just 2-3 months, so if it is possible to speed up the ~9 month incubation period you could probably get very fast experimental loops on trying stuff with them. I'm not the only one who thinks they might be interesting for senescence researchers to look into!

One interesting thing would be to figure out what kinds of interventions would get them to a third year of life and/or a third breeding cycle? (Maybe this is impossible without genetic engineering, but if so: why? and which genes?)

Another thing would be to see if the incubation period could be reduced somehow (or expanded maybe just to "try the opposite")? They are a desert species, and basically skip over the unpleasant dry part of the year, so I bet the long incubation is caused by optional/regulatory timing adjustments rather than actual metabolic limits.

Another interesting thing would be to try to get their germ line working in vitro and construct artificial eggs for them from scratch? Being able to reboot reptiliomorph life from a frozen sample and some 3D printing specs would be pretty awesome (like from a space colonization perspective).

And a "Labordi Life Extension Project", a "Labordi Fast Incubation Project", and a "Labordi Egg Creation Project" all probably have natural crossover applications

Also, the species is only listed as "vulnerable" based on habitat threats, so a successful captive breeding program seems like it would be wildly net positive for them as a species.

Currently, I know of no down sides to picking them up as a model species (but I'm still poking around in the literature).

 

[kinyonga]

@JenRM said…”One interesting thing would be to figure out what kinds of interventions would get them to a third year of life and/or a third breeding cycle?”…Why?

As soon as you put them into a captive situation with good suitable husbandry for that species, chances are their lives will be longer…so how will you know if it’s your chosen interventions that increased the life span or the captive existence that’s extending the life?

 

[Mendez]

Sometimes an animal with no quota will pop up into the hobby by mistake. This has already happened with labordi. If I recall correctly, someone in Europe had a pair and got them to live for two or three years by treating them for parasites and giving them conditions that were much more suitable for survivability year-round. Their lifecycle is not exclusive to the species. In fact, many speculate that this happens to many other species, including Furcifer campani (the jeweled chameleon). They experience incredibly harsh winters. It's possible that one or two survive, but most will die. In captivity, they can live for two or three years or more. They don't necessarily hit a biologically imposed lifespan limit but rather an environmentally imposed limit.

For senescence studies, @kinyonga is right. There are too many factors to account for, at least from the start. You need to establish a baseline first. If you can establish the lifespan of captive bred larbodi in a controlled setting, and have reproducible results, then you could start experimenting. You have to establish their biological limits, and not just limits imposed by environmental factors.