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A new species of living great ape!
Topic Started: Nov 2 2017, 12:05 PM (1,146 Views)
Tartarus
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Flisch
Nov 3 2017, 03:34 AM
Because different people have different ideas of what conservation means. The leading idea among the big aka popular conservation societies is to keep the status quo. Humans think the snapshot they experienced in this fleeting moment of natural history must be preserved at all costs, rather than making sure that ecologies are robust and stable. This basically means that populations that are separate simply due to recent geological barriers (like, say, rising sea levels due to the end of the ice age) must be kept separate forever.

As you can tell, I don't buy into that ideology at all. Nature is at its best when it is evolving. Its natural fluidity and flexibility is why life clings to, well, itself despite everything the universe has thrown at it. We should not try to stop it, we should offer a guiding hand as for the first time in the entire history of life, it gained the ability to understand itself.
But what about the whole thing about how interspecies hybrids are usually sterile? If endangered animals keep producing sterile offspring this will prevent their lineages from continuing on into the future and increases their chances of extinction, so in that context people being critical of hybrids in conservation is quite rational and not at all the "preserve the status quo" silliness you seem to be painting it all as.
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HangingThief
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Datura
Nov 3 2017, 10:09 AM
Insect Illuminati Get Spooked
Nov 2 2017, 08:38 PM
May only be semi relevant, but hybrids are severely frowned upon my tarantula keepers.
This is pretty common among such communities. I was looking for info on hybrid corys because my little sister's catfish laid an egg, that was most likely a hybrid, but all I found was shit like "HURP DURP DAE HYBRIDS ARE RUBBISH?".

I seriously want to create a fertile line of hybrids just to watch people with this mentality burn. I bet I could pull off a butterfly hybrid.
People hate hybrids because they cause confusion. It's often hard enough to tell different species apart without hybrids to mess everything up. If you don't care about preserving the purity of species or locales that are very similar anyway, even very different species might not show signs of being hybrids until they've matured enough to develop their distinctive features. In tarantulas this typically takes years, and they're usually sold long before then.

Hey.


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Hybrid
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I think I can honestly say if there was any accidental admixture between these two populations of orangutan, it's not a huge issue. As long as we can keep those two species alive, a little mixing is harmless in the long run.

Hybridization in nature is common, it happens a lot. It's so well known we have terms to describe places where it's relatively common in the wild: hybrid zones. Depending on how well defined the populations are, we can divide them further into primary and secondary hybrid zones too. Many species today are the result of hybridization, such as the wisent (likely the result of mixing of aurochs and the steppe bison) or the weird bat Artibeus schwartzi (a three-way hybrid). Many creatures we have today that seem super unique also had some hybridization in the past. One example that comes to mind are polar bears and brown bears, which have mixed a few times in the past, leading to some populations of brown bears being more closely related to polar bears than others.

What many conservationists want to do is retain a populations 'uniqueness' in the wild and avoid messing with it. The best case situation is return them to a state that they were, before us humans messed with them on the levels we had. I think we can all agree that's a bit unrealistic, once you change something, there's no going back. I don't think there's anything wrong with attempting to retain diversity, however avoiding hybrids like the plague can be pretty silly in my opinion. In nature, a species that's dying out that has very little choices and there wasn't any barriers, would likely procreate with a closely related species. While conservationists avoid inbreeding, there's a certain point when a population is so small that's going to happen regardless. Having a population of hybrids I would argue is preferable to one made vulnerable due to forced isolated.

Overall I would rather have a hybrid population of organisms, than none of it at all; having the memory of that species alive and well is better than having the only thing to remember them from being bones, photos, or taxidermy ghosts.

Now when we accidentally create hybrids from invasive species that risk the native species of dying out, like mallard ducks breeding populations of other ducks into extinction or introduced species of tiger salamanders hybridizing with native species and producing super-salamanders that risk many amphibians in the ecosystem, I think that's a case were hybrids are the least desirable option.

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But what about the whole thing about how interspecies hybrids are usually sterile?

That's not the issue. The whole problem comes when two closely related populations (species or not) can interbred and produce viable offspring. If the two species can't produce viable young whatsoever, or only in specific situations (as with how only female big cat hybrids can breed, which can produce weird things like liligers) then they aren't really going to be considered as very problematic in conservation than this problem. Those ones are controversial due to being considered a 'waste of money' or an 'abomination of nature'. That can go into a different line of debate though.

What Flisch is talking about is avoiding any admixture between two populations in order to retain the status quo that existed before any anthropogenic shenanigans. Think of a 'generic' tiger, where many subspecies were bred into it, rather than something like a zonkey which is a reproductive dead end.
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Yiqi15
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This thread should be renamed "Is subspecies hybridisation really that bad for conservation?". It started about an announcement of a new species orangutan, and now its about genetics.
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The differences between tiger subspecies are quite small. It really doesn't matter if they all meld together and become just tigers/
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Tartarus
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Moving the discussion back on track to the Tapanuli orangutan, this species has already gotten a wikipedia page now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapanuli_orangutan
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flashman63
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BeetleBoo
Nov 2 2017, 12:16 PM
Mao
Nov 2 2017, 12:11 PM
BeetleBoo
Nov 2 2017, 12:05 PM
No, this isn't a joke. This is real, a new species of great ape has just been discovered.
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/tapanuli-orangutan-pongo-tapanuliensis-05389.html

Darwin's beard, this is amazing! Unfortunately it is also the most endangered species of great ape, and is threatened by extinction due to plans to build a dam in the heart of its territory.
It just looks like a normal orangutan.
. . . so???
Though it's horrible, this is honestly my natural reaction.
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