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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dave Jay" data-source="post: 131404" data-attributes="member: 27677">Great insights [USER=27883]@Tortoise Tom[/USER]!I think because of the lower mortality rate of captive bred slings weaker spiders or spiders with undesirable traits survive to breed, passing on genes to future generations that would in nature be mostly culled from the population. For instance a sling with a slow feeding response would likely not survive to become a breeding adult in nature and pass on whatever genes are involved to a new generation but in captivity they can, and so can their offspring and so on and so on. This would be compounded with each captive bred generation, natures basic "only the strong survive" rule has been broken, in captivity the weak also survive and breed.That is an overstatement of course, in captivity we still do not expect a 100% survival rate but the percentage of survival is higher until we take into account deaths through poor husbandry. Here is where the tables turn, individuals not tolerant of poor captive conditions are culled from the captive population and mostly don't survive to breed.I've kept fish for nearly 40 years so I have seen this in action, fish that were only for dedicated experts years ago require no special care now because the individuals not tolerant of captive conditions that do not closely match the conditions found in nature mostly did not survive to breed in captivity. However the wild caught fish of those species are still difficult to maintain. This is easily seen in various South American Cichlid species, Discus being the obvious example, they'll survive and breed in hard alkaline tapwater now, soft acidic blackwater is only required for wild caught specimens.To sum up, I think that given enough time and generations captive bred populations can differ from wild populations, the genes culled from each population are different and the genetic makeup required for the best chance of reproduction in each population is different.Therefore I think in some cases if you released say 300 captive bred slings into an area where 300 wild bred slings had been removed from the mortality rate among the captive bred slings in the wild would be higher than it would have been among the wild slings. It could also be that the mortality rate of the wild slings kept in captivity would be higher than if they were left in the wild.All hypothetical of course and I don't think Tarantula Keeping as a hobby is old enough or widespread enough for the drift in populations to be pronounced enough to have had much effect as yet, but it must happen eventually imo.</blockquote>

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