Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

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Re: Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

Postby Mario Schweiger » Sun Aug 19, 2012 7:43 am

Michael Glass wrote:There are a lot of fertile inter-genera (?) hybrids in Northern American rat snakes. Some of 'em will only mate being tricked under vivarium conditions.


An Example for wild interbreeding now from Florida.
Natural, Pantherophis guttatus (newst: they are Pituophis), corn snakes were distributed along the coastal ridges (pine ridge in the east and oak ridge in the west), where it is much drier and nearly never flooded. Patherophis obsoletus (ssp. quadrivittatus and rossaleni) is distributed in the humid to wet interior of Florida.
Due to the digging of large channels, with all the sand and rocks just beside the channels, P. guttatus now slowly enters the central parts of Florida along the dry ridges along the channels and interbreeds sometimes with obsoleta. And the offspring is fertile.
A typical example for different habitat choice. If the two habitat types become a network the interbreeding barriere is gone.

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Re: Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

Postby Mario Schweiger » Sun Aug 19, 2012 10:33 am

Sorry Jeroen, something went wrong right now.
My post (this one, I copied it) came with your name. When I deleted it, also your original was gone!

Mario, your example sounds to me like an incomplete speciation event, followed by secondary contact. If there is no reduced viability in the offspring and no restriction seems to exist in gene flow, I'd prefer they were not different species, but merely ecotypes/subspecies/... . In theory ;)


OK, and what's with Bombina bombina / variegata and Lacerta viridis / bilineata?
And Natrix maura and N. tessellata might be 3 (sub)species each ;)
See: Joger, U., U. Fritz, D. Guicking, S. Kalyabina-Hauf, Z.T. Nagy & M. Wink (2007): Phylogeography of western Palaearctic reptiles – Spatial and temporal speciation patterns.- Zoologischer Anzeiger 246 (2007) 293–313. -- PDF

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Re: Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

Postby Jeroen Speybroeck » Sun Aug 19, 2012 10:56 am

I attribute more value in evidence of restricted gene flow, reproductive isolation, ... than morphology. Intraspecies morphological variability may thus be huge or cryptic, doesn't matter.

I'm no great fan of bilineata/viridis... Don't know enough about Bombina - is there a hybrid zone with all fertile, intermediate populations? Seems in any case parallel with the Florida story (different habitat).
What about aspis-latastei? All fertile? The worst case to me is perhaps Speleomantes italicus - ambrosii = I'm still looking for someone to explain to me why these are not subspecies or less.
I don't think European maura and tessellata are superspecies, but who knows...

Let's kick in the big one - Michael (and anyone else), how do you define a species, if you accept fertile offspring?
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Re: Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

Postby Mario Schweiger » Sun Aug 19, 2012 11:12 am

Jeroen Speybroeck wrote:Let's kick in the big one - Michael (and anyone else), how do you define a species, if you accept fertile offspring?


That's exactly what I try to ask all the time now ;)
Where a subspecies ends and a species begins :lol:

Bombina: hybrids are 100% fertile, in E-Austria there are many populations with hybrids only (out of Austrian Atlas, map too)
bombina.jpg
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Re: Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

Postby Mario Schweiger » Sun Aug 19, 2012 11:20 am

Most new investigations on hybridization have been made by our friends from the big island west of Europa.
Here a few examples:
LEACHÉ, A.D. & C.J. COLE (2007): Hybridization between multiple fence lizard lineages in an ecotone: locally discordant variation in mitochondrial DNA, chromosomes, and morphology.- Molecular Ecology (2007) 16, 1035–1054 -- PDF

LECLERE, J.B., E.P. HOAGLUND, J. SCHAROSCH, C.E. SMITH & T. GAMBLE (2012): Two Naturally Occurring Intergeneric Hybrid Snakes (Pituophis catenifer sayi x Pantherophis vulpinus; Lampropeltini, Squamata) from the Midwestern United States.- Journal of Herpetology, Vol. 46, No. 2, 257–262, -- PDF

Placyk Jr., J.S., B.M. Fitzpatrick, G.S. Casper, R.L. Small, R.G. Reynolds, D.W.A. Noble, R.J. Brooks & G.M. Burghardt (2012): Hybridization between two gartersnake species
(Thamnophis) of conservation concern: a threat or an important natural interaction?- Conserv Genet. DOI 10.1007/s10592-012-0315-4 -- PDF
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Re: Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

Postby Mario Schweiger » Sun Aug 19, 2012 11:40 am

OK, coming back to interbreeding in terrariums.

Why, in nature two species dont interbreed (or very rarely only), like ammodytes and aspis in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy? If you keep them together in a terrarium it works much more "easy", especially if the two species are from distinct populations (for example aspis from lake Garda and ammodytes from Montenegro). It seems, snakes have no species-related foreplay (beside neck biting in some species), so what it is? Do snake species in overlaping areas have developed different pheromones, than their relatives far away? Any investigations on that? The same for the example ammodytes - xanthina or another example (but dont know if the offspring is fertile, at least partially): Macrovipera schweizeri x Daboia mauritanica.
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Re: Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

Postby Jeroen Speybroeck » Mon Aug 20, 2012 9:17 am

Mario Schweiger wrote:Do snake species in overlaping areas have developed different pheromones, than their relatives far away?

That would be a molecular form of character displacement - never heard about, but maybe... Interesting thought...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_displacement
(a clear European example is the helveticus-like males of Lissotriton vulgaris in areas where helveticus is lacking, while they look most different in areas of sympatry)

Googled now that something like it would exist in sea urchins...
http://palumbi.stanford.edu/manuscripts ... 202003.pdf
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Re: Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

Postby Jeroen Speybroeck » Mon Aug 20, 2012 9:21 am

Mario Schweiger wrote:LECLERE, J.B., E.P. HOAGLUND, J. SCHAROSCH, C.E. SMITH & T. GAMBLE (2012): Two Naturally Occurring Intergeneric Hybrid Snakes (Pituophis catenifer sayi x Pantherophis vulpinus; Lampropeltini, Squamata) from the Midwestern United States.- Journal of Herpetology, Vol. 46, No. 2, 257–262, -- PDF

"These snakes represent only the second and third confirmed instances of naturally occurring intergeneric hybridization among squamate reptile species."
Not really a big deal, if you first split the hell out of all the old genera ;)
I wouldn't even want to start a discussion on how to delimit and define genera :lol:
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Re: Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

Postby Daniel Kane » Mon Aug 20, 2012 11:57 am

Forgive me if I have misinterpreted the data, but is Fig. 20 in Joger, U., Fritz, U., Guicking, D., Kalyabina-Hauf, S., Nagy, Z. & Wink, M. (2007) suggesting that the alpine clade of berus is more differentiated from the western European clade than V. nikolskii and barani? If so, what were the deciding factors on giving full species status to the latter two? Could it be that the relatedness of the alpine clade to the western European clade (& others) has not been dicovered until more recently and therefore it hasn't been suggested to split this clade from the 'V. berus berus' of western Europe?

I can see now that this debate over what defines a (sub)species will continue for a very long time! Nevertheless, it is an interesting topic.
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Re: Danube Delta ursinii are moldavica

Postby Jeroen Speybroeck » Mon Aug 20, 2012 12:55 pm

Michael Glass wrote:If we work with V. graeca based on mtDNA; shouldn't we raise the same discussion regarding the Alp-clade of V. berus given we accept bosniensis?

Imho, regardless of taxonomical level, the Alpine (or sensu Ursenbacher et al. Italian) berus clade does indeed seem to deserve a name, although we could argue again about data availability etc., but I'll behave.

Daniel Kane wrote:Forgive me if I have misinterpreted the data, but is Fig. 20 in Joger, U., Fritz, U., Guicking, D., Kalyabina-Hauf, S., Nagy, Z. & Wink, M. (2007) suggesting that the alpine clade of berus is more differentiated from the western European clade than V. nikolskii and barani? If so, what were the deciding factors on giving full species status to the latter two? Could it be that the relatedness of the alpine clade to the western European clade (& others) has not been dicovered until more recently and therefore it hasn't been suggested to split this clade from the 'V. berus berus' of western Europe?

I believe that nikolskii was "cancelled" exactly on the basis of this data. I guess the same should go for barani? Mario?
The position of the Alpine clade came as a bit of a (more recent) surprise, I think, yes.
See also (although no niko or baran included) => http://vipersgarden.at/PDF_files/PDF-579.pdf

So, now I won't behave and state that there's need for more research before it can be split. ;)
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