 |
A full
grown liger is a biiggg cat! A male lion and
a
female tiger get to know each well, and their
love
child is huge. It doesn’t happen in the wild
because
the ranges of lions and tigers don’t
overlap,
and they don’t have computer dating
services.
The liger is bigger than either parent,
and
this is a problem during birthing. They have
many
birth defects and often die young.
|
When putting organisms into categories (taxonomy), we go from bigger, more general categories to smaller more specific ones. The more similar two organisms are, evolutionarily and genetically, the more levels of their taxonomic classification they will have in common.
Question of the day:
A tigon is the result
of a cross between male tiger and a female lion, while a liger is the offspring
of a male lion and a tigress. But are these new species? And just how far can
you go when you cross-breed?
There are instances when different species mate, but the
outcomes, while interesting, may or may not be new species. It helps to know the
classification levels.
Kingdom (domain) -
Insects, dogs and people are all very different, but they are all animals.
Phylum (Division for plants) – usually these
group things by a common body plan or some other morphologic character, or a
certain degree of genetic relatedness. Arthropods are all related by a
chitin exoskeleton, so flies and lobsters are both arthropods, but flowering
plants have fruits and conifers have cones, so they are in different
divisions.
Class – these
groups have more in common, either physiologically or genetically. Cows and
dogs both have hair and give birth to live young, so they are both in the class
Mammalia. However, flowering plants are divided into two classes, monocots
and dicots, based on seed and vascular tissue differences.
 |
Here
is the classification scheme for several familiar
mammals.
Cats are all in the same family, but there are
several
genera, while all dogs fit in one genus and all
wolves
in another. Black bears and Kodiak bears are a
different
genus than polar bears, but hikers and bigfoot
monsters
have reported sightings of polar and Kodiak
bear hybrids….
well hikers have been reporting them.
|
Family – Now we
are getting down to smaller differences, but still just as important. All the big-eared bats and all the
thick thumbed bats are both included in vespertine family, because they
come out to feed in the evenings. On the other hand, maples and mahogany trees
are both in the order of Sapindalae, but they belong to different families
based on their leaf and flower anatomies.
Genus –comes from
the Greek for “kin,” so these organisms in the same genus are closely related.
In animals, both moths and butterflies are in the same order, but they are
broken into 124 different families, and the family Nyphalidae, which contains the Monarch butterfly, has over 600
genera (the plural of genus).
Species – These
are the individual distinct group of organisms. Usually, the distinction is
made based on whether their breeding can produce fertile offspring. So bulldogs
and St. Bernards are both species of dog, since they can make mutts.
 |
The
africanized honeybee is more likely to swarm and
migrate
when food supplies are low, so they can be seen
in
masses like the one above. For hives, they usually
invade
an existing hive, quit out the queen and install their
own.
The danger in these bees is that they are more likely
to
swarm when agitated, and they will chase the agitator
for
a much longer distance (a mile or more) than regular
honeybees
(100 yards or so).
|
Now that we have that information – let’s rephrase our
question of the day. Can you breed
(hybridize) different species and create a new species?
Cross-breeds are common within species (intraspecies hybridization), like with cats or dogs – not cats with
dogs, you’d never want to do that! And we know they are fertile, so you end up
with some dogs that are ¼ this, 1/8 that, and ¼ the other. What about between species?
Interspecies hybrids
usually don’t give you fertile offspring. Since the definition of a species is
a group of animals that can mate to give fertile offspring, then you would be
hard pressed to create a new species by breeding different species together.
For example, the liger and tigon males are always sterile,
so even though the females are sometimes fertile, they still can’t mate a
tigon to a tigon. This would be necessary to make a stable species. So the
chances are low on the interspecies level.
That would mean that new species coming from breeding of
animals from different genera would be even less likely to produce new species.
However, individuals can be hybridized. Intergeneric
hybridization is easier to do in plants; orchid growers have made many
different intergeneric crosses, like little Dr. Frankensteins with green
thumbs.
 |
Compare
the two marine mammals that are jumping. One
is
bigger, darker colored, and apparently can jump
higher.
That one is the wolphin. Her name is Kekaimalu,
the
offspring of a bottlenose dolphin and a false killer
whale.
Her offspring, Kawili Kai, is bigger than a dolphin
as
well, but is lighter colored than mama.
|
The rarest hybridization is the interfamilial hybrid. Most examples have occurred in birds, where
game fowl are housed together. The Pea-guinea is a hybrid between a peacock and
a guinea fowl hen. They look weird and don’t survive beyond a year or two, so there
is no way that these could form a stable species.
It would take a bunch of posts to talk about why certain
hybrids will work and others won’t, and why new species are not generally produced
in this way. But for now - how about two exceptions?
 |
What
do you get when you cross a blueberry with a
snowberry
(maggots, that is)? You get a Lornicera fly –
O.K.
not a funny joke, but a pretty cool twist in
evolution.
As fruitflies go, this is a pretty cool looking
one;
you don’t have the ghoulish red eyes to deal with
and
three stripes make it look a little like a lightbulb!
|
The creation of this new fruit fly species did have a little
help from humans. For about 250 years, honeysuckle plants have been imported to
the North America from Europe. In the 1990’s scientists found the Lonicera fly and
tried to see what other flies it was related to. Low and behold it was a hybrid
of the snowberry maggot and the blueberry maggot. But why didn’t the hybrids
breed with the parent species and dilute the hybrid genome back into
the two stable species? How did the hybrid become a new, stable species?
These hybrid
flies preferred to feed on the honeysuckle, so they lived on the imported
plants, while the parent species lived on their favorites (snowberry bush or blueberry bush). This is a kind of geographic isolation; the Lonicera hybrids find only Lonicera
hybrids when it comes time to mate and they end up mating hybrid to hybrid for
many generations. This resulted in a stable species, the process is called hybrid speciation.
 |
The
Heliconius heurippa butterfly has an
unusually
large
black bar that crosses its body. This must be
fairly
obvious to other butterflies of the same
hybridization
and it must also be pretty attractive.
Both
male and female hybrids search out the wide
black
bands. I would love to know the molecular
biology of that specificity of attraction.
|
The hybrids preferentially mate with other butterflies with
the bold stripes, so they are mating hybrid to hybrid and are stabilizing the
new species. Darwin would blow his top – or maybe not. He never said this
couldn’t happen, just that it was less likely.
Next week we will ask why some birds migrate while others stay put year round.
