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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4130 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 9, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Where you draw the line at what is the same species or is not the same species is rather arbitrary. One definition is that two animals are not the same species if they cannot have fertile offspring; but there are lots of animals like that that we happily classify as different species, like lions and tigers. I think the more commonly used definition is that two animals are different species if they do not mate in the wild. And as I understand it, bonobos and chimpanzees very rarely mate in the wild.

Indeed. By the nature of evolution, closely related species blur at the edges. Interfertility remains the main criterion to distinguish species, but it's neither binary (there are many degrees of non-interfertility: won't mate > will mate but not conceive > will conceive but not carry to term > hybrids are born malformed > hybrids are healthy but sterile > hybrids are fertile but have lower fitness) nor transitive (see ring species, where A is interfertile with B and B with C, but C is not interfertile with A). Besides, most species are named on morphological or genetical grounds, because checking interfertility with their relatives would be impractical. And of course many species are exclusively asexual and do not mate at all -- just look at the mess that is bacterial taxonomy, where populations of a single "species" can be more genetically diverse than mammals and fish.

So dogs wolves and coyotes are so the same thing then?

https://bcrc.bio.umass.edu/courses/spring2019/biol/biol312section2/content/are-coyotes-wolves-and-dogs-really-separate-species

Apparently wolves and coyotes very rarely mate in the wild, so they would be different species.

The infamous comparison was between red wolves and coyotes, and red wolves evolved from a mix of coyotes and grey wolves.

If we talk grey wolves and coyotes, I think the differences are larger, but don't know how much larger.

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