Can a jag and red devil breed together?

[jjohnwm]

Yes, like John implied , the taxonomists change things for their own reasons. They want to publish, and one way to do that is to lump species together or split them up.

Lately they are doing a lot of lumping in birds...Still arbitrary.

"Implied"? Dang...am I developing the ability to be subtle in my declining years?

Don't even get me started on lumpers and splitters. Can't actually discover something new, so gotta make something up that proves the other guy last week was wrong.

If I followed them as religiously as they would like, my birding life list would need to be in pencil to allow for constant erasing and correcting.

 

[Gershom]

I didn’t want to put words in your mouth, so I erased “said” and wrote “implied”.

 

[Mazan]

Tigers and lions can…

Yes, they can, but not under natural conditions, even when lions were more widespread in Asia they did not breed with tigers as the two species have completely different habitat requirements and social (or not in the case of tigers) systems. Only in zoos does this hybridization happen. Several (many?) other distinct species can produce viable offspring, but only usually when a rare species is swamped by a much more common one, nearly always the result of human intervention including hunting , habitat loss, or species introductions outside their natural range - eg European wild cats with domestic cats, Ethiopian wolves with domestic dogs, and some Californian salamanders, where the hybrids are actually more successful than the native species, which is likely to disappear due the the introduction of a non-native species.

It is certainly true that all the recent fish taxonomy papers I have seen are based on molecular criteria, though sometimes combined with morphological features. Some of these results correspond with previous descriptions, others not so much.

But there is no obvious cutoff point for how much genetic difference is needed to qualify as a species.

Very true - the species concept is not straightforward!

 

[cichlids209]

Had to rehome him last night as soon as I was done with my weekly water change she flipped a switch and started going psycho on him attacking him without letting up . And she dug out a pit and I have sand up 7inches on the front lol she’s a true red devil from TUIC

 

[jjohnwm]

Yes, they can, but not under natural conditions... the species concept is not straightforward!

Yes, pairing up a couple of fish that would never meet in nature...forcing them into close confines with one another, and likely with no other members of either of their species...and then pointing gleefully at their spawn and saying "See? See? I told you they would interbreed!" is pretty silly.

Of course, we have people who go one step further; they throw a couple of fish together...both are females...and then when one or both of them produce a batch of infertile eggs, their owners trumpet that they have spawned!

 

[Gershom]

Yes, they can, but not under natural conditions, even when lions were more widespread in Asia they did not breed with tigers
[/QUOTE]

That is part of my point—this simple biological device as a definition for species is not very useful in the real world.
On the other hand, when you look at the difference between different but related species of birds, for example, they may be much more similar to each other than white and black humans are.
My personal preference for a definition goes back to natural populations which do not normally interbreed.
Ultimately the species decision is arbitrary.

 

[Mazan]

Yes, they can, but not under natural conditions, even when lions were more widespread in Asia they did not breed with tigers

That is part of my point—this simple biological device as a definition for species is not very useful in the real world.
On the other hand, when you look at the difference between different but related species of birds, for example, they may be much more similar to each other than white and black humans are.
My personal preference for a definition goes back to natural populations which do not normally interbreed.
Ultimately the species decision is arbitrary.
[/QUOTE]
Yes I agree, but and how do you decide when distinct populations represent different species or just geographical variants
or sub species? It does get very complicated!