There's a lot of good points in this discussion.
Frankly, it disgusts me completely that the hobby is responsible for what's happening. Just think for a second. We're all a part of the salamander hobby for various reasons, but I certainly hope the vast majority are in it because we love the animals. Yet as a collective whole, WE are responsible for the near extinction of this animal. If there was no salamander hobby, there would be no kaiseri problem. Pretty sobering, isn't it?
When first given the chance to buy kaiseri, I turned it down on moral principles. In hindsight, this was a pretty naive position, though it's hard to tell whether it was the right one in principle or not. One person making a stand is ultimately stupid, but if we'd all done this, there'd be no demand. It was probably the wrong move, looking back, because at least I'd be producing animals at this point. I guess that's a bit of irony for you.
Which brings us to another disturbing issue. The vast majority of the people buying the WC kaiseri are not producing offspring. They're buying the animals because they're beautiful and rare, but many of them aren't even salamander keepers. This is a factor in most salamander species; very few people breed anything at all. Like has been mentioned in this discussion, most animals sold or given away do not make it to their 3rd year. Overall, I'd be willing to guess that over 50% of all kaiseri that made it to the end buyer and survived initial problems are probably still dead anyhow. I say this with no actual evidence, but given what I've seen and heard selling animals, I see no reason this is any different with kaiseri.
People have mentioned earlier that the high price of an animal means that people will take better care of it. I know for a fact that this is not true. Even in the dart frog hobby, the average lifespan of $50-100 frogs is less than five years; a quarter of their expected life span. On the other hand, I know people with 20-30 year old fire belly newts, or Xenopus, etc. A higher price will stave off many impulse buys that typically end poorly, but there are still far too many people with more cents than sense out there that don't think twice about spending $500-1000 on something they'll lose interest in in a few months. It's true that a low price results in the idea of a disposable pet, but a higher price doesn't have an opposite effect.
I don't agree with the pricing on CB kaiseri, though. $5 is just too little; it just generates more demand than it reduces. You're going to all of a sudden get people from other herp hobbies buying them up, because they know the price will go back up eventually. Rather than being a market of 200/year, it could easily become a market of 2,000 or more, and they'd still sell out. (including the WC adults). It'd hurt the profit margins on the collectors, but they'd still collect them; they're making a profit as long as the wholesalers are buying them from them.
A price between $20-30 seems more reasonable. Frankly, I don't see any reason the vast majority of captive bred salamanders should be sold for much more than $30; this isn't like dart frogs where you get 30 or so frogets per pair per year if you're lucky. Price should be tied into the cost of raising the eggs-larvae, cost of maintaining parents, time invested, and then some degree of reasonable profit for the effort and service. With animals that produce few offspring per year (Salamandra spp.), take a lot of work, take a long time to morph, or with older, mature animals, I can see charging a bit more to compensate, but kaiseri do not fall into those exceptions.
If we as a hobby decide to start selling kaiseri for $30 each, I think we could really make a decent difference. For one, the breeders would still get plenty of compensation, since the overall cost per animal will still be around $10 with the kaiseri, and there would be a good number of animals to do this with. Additionally, sales would be very high; you wouldn't be stuck sitting on unsellable animals, or even stuck with slow selling animals for very long. I know I'd certainly jump at any animal that meant I wouldn't have to feed them for 6-18 months before selling out! And at this price, you'd really start hurting the collectors in this manner. You're still going to create demand with cheap kaiseri, but at $30 each, you stand a better chance of getting other breeders to cooperate and increase the number of animals for sale. If we lower the prices without increasing the number to offset the additional demand, we'll fail, so we need to get as many breeders in on this as possible. It's overall number available at a lower price rather than overall low price that's going to make a difference. Suddenly, the collectors can't sell to the wholesalers anymore at their high prices (I'm guessing they make $50-75 each, though this is just my estimate), and this would force the collectors to sell at lower rates (30-50, or less, and even then, they still can't compete with the captive bred animals, who will simply be able to produce more animals per year than they can collect.
On top of this, kaiseri won't get devalued. If somehow kaiseri were to become established as "The $5 newt," popularity would drop off and it would eventually be at risk of falling out of the hobby. They wouldn't be worth captive breeding anymore, and interest would decline, and after that 3-5 year window, only a handful of people would still have them. On various degrees, this has happened with a number of species. Where are the American carnifex and cristatus, etc. these days? (Though to be honest, I don't see kaiseri as legal animals for long enough for this to become an issue).
And Pete? I think what Michael is saying is that he's offering to sell 100 animals at $20 each, not buy.
Overall, I don't know how effective lowering the prices on kaiseri will be. But I agree that something needs to be done; we can't just sit here and watch the species get wiped out by our own greed. I'm actually in the middle of a project to eventually eliminate the need for WC dwarf sirens (an abundant species that doesn't need this distinction, but otherwise it's a similar scenario), so I believe such a project is possible. Given enough time (and time is the key point; we probably need 5 years to get anything going), breeding groups could be established and propagated in mass breeding setups, and we could flood the market pretty easily.
So basically, if you want to do something about kaiseri and you have a breeding group, my advice is to raise as many eggs as you can, hold a number back for future breeding groups, distribute as many animals as you can to people that have shown they're capable of producing CB animals, and to sell them at reasonable prices. And any stalling effort we can have that would buy wild kaiseri some time is definitely worth pursuing. I know that would be my plan if I had a breeding group of kaiseri.
And remember; just because something exists doesn't mean we have a right to keep it. We (the newt hobby) have pretty much proven that we don't deserve kaiseri at this point by practically driving them to extinction. So l think this is our chance to prove otherwise.
, I guess this scenario highlights my skepticism of the cheap newt approach.
