Ommatotriton ophryticus "nesterovi"

Hi

Can someone please tell me the significance of "nesterovi" .. Is it a reference to the taxonomist or a location or just a redundant name the still finds a use in the hobby...either way would significantly affect a blood line if I crossed Ommatotriton ophryticus "nesterovi" with Ommatotriton ophryticus

apologies if this is a lame question but if you don't ask you don't find out.

thanks

I suppose nesterovi is, if not a valid subspecies, a differentiated population which means that you just decrease the genetic diversity between lines by crossing them, which should not be done just as much as crossing O. ophryticus with O. vittatus.

Thanks Janusz

That is just what I wanted to know

Cheers Kevin

O. ophryticus nesterovi has been used to describe banded newts from north-west Turkey, with O. ophryticus ophryticus including north-east Turkey and the Caucasus. They're both essentially identical in appearance.

Banded newts were imported into the UK from NW Turkey in the late 1980s, and from the Caucasus in the late 1990s/early 2000s; so the 1980s imports could be regarded as O. ophryticus nesterovi, and the 1990s ones as O. ophryticus ophryticus.

Some of the people who bred bandeds from the Turkish imports are still breeding bandeds today- I don't know if they are the same stock, if they've replaced them with Caucasian stock, or if they're a mixture.

If you had O. ophryticus of unknown origin or parentage (as most of the animals in captivity will be), and you bred them with O. ophryticus nesterovi, you'd just have more O. ophryticus of unknown origin.

Hi Caleb

Seemed to have missed your post somehow. Thanks for the insight.. I guess as with a lot of things its a matter of trust whether you accept the provenance of the animals you own. As a collector of labyrinth fishes once told me the only way to ensure this is to collect your own from the wild. Which I am well aware that in this particular hobby is not acceptable.