🌿 Clean Breeding Beetle Project 🌿🐛
What is this?
I am experimenting with battle beetle breeding and thought perhaps the data I'm collecting would be of interest to other battle beetle enthusiasts.

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Goal
Breed rare color, high stat beetles free of inbreeding

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Method
I started by choosing a common species that would be fairly easy to acquire, namely Augosoma centaurus (AugCen) beetles. I created a 🔗spreadsheet in which to track the breeding program data. I wanted to see if I could accurately predict the color(s) of the larvae I would get from each breeding by recording the colors of each larva's sire and dam. I kept a raw data log which included the name, sex, color, stats at birth, sire name, sire color, dam name, dam color, and breeding prospects of each beetle. In another tab, I built a pivot table that details the frequency at which each color beetle can be bred from every sire/dam color combination I attempted. I ensured that no inbreeding occured by tracking the beetle pairings in 🔗FamilyEcho, a free family tree creation site. 

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Conclusions
Overall, I was able to make more intelligent color-based breeding decisions as more data was generated. In most cases, I could reliably produce blue, red, piebald, and iridescent larvae. However, I was not able to increase the stat counts of my beetle larvae in general. I seldom bred any larvae with greater than 11 or 12 stat counts, compared to a base count of 10 for the AugCen species. One major challenge was locating high stat beetles of clean heritage to integrate into the project. Keeping enough studs on hand that met all the criteria (high stat, desirable color, clean) was often too high a demand. Ultimately I sacrificed stat counts to get the color and heritage I wanted. 

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Next Attempt
For my next line of clean beetles, I am using Rhopalizus nitens (RhoNit) beetles. I will be using a nearly identical data collection and analysis procedure. However, I will be adjusting my approach to breeding. Specifically, I will keep only a single stud on hand at a time and focus more heavily on training. There may be multiple males in my beetle mounds, but only one will be used to procreate each new generation of larvae. I think this will be an additional safeguard against potential inbreeding and produce more replicable data. It will be easier to isolate stud data by color to analyze the performance of all green studs, for instance; or to examine the performance of males with base starting stat counts (12 for RhoNit beetles, versus 10 in AugCens) to males with higher starting stats.

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RhoNit Data
If you're interested in checking out my progress with RhoNit beetles, you can see the project data via the following links:

🔗RhoNit Breeding Data
🔗RhoNit Family TreeHTML Design Credit to User #149381