antsterr
Always mostly awesome
Reading through the Tessara hybrid theory thread and recalling back to the many ultra/ultramel hybid threads I've been wondering what a hybrid is?
My question is about % of purity and at which point does a gene, even one borrowed from a some other Pantherophis or a Lampropeltis, ever become assimilated? When does it move from "illegal immigrant" to "naturalized citizen" so to speak?
It seems a common opinion that hybridization happens to some degree in the wild, yet for the most part we still would have to call wild specimens "pure" as there really can't be a higher standard for what a "real" corn snake is other than a normal wild specimen. What percent "pure" then is a wild corn snake? If 100 years ago a random texas rat crossed paths with a seductive corn and offspring was produced, assuming the offspring survived and went on to procreate with the local "pure" corn population, and offspring continued to grow and reproduce on average every five years and at no point did any of the hybrid clutch's decedents ever mingle, you now have a animal that is only 1/500,000th texas rat and 99.9998% pure. You can't even buy gold that pure, and ivory soap doesn't even come close!
But let's say that one hybrid breeding produced a new dominant morph, lets call it "texican" (from our texas rat influence) and our 99.9998% pure clutch are 50% texican. Has texican now become an assimliated morph for pure corn snakes or would they forever be listed as hybrid animals on iansvivarium.com?
I recall almost panicking once upon a time when I heard my precious diffused golddust project (still haven't produced one) was supposedly an abomination to nature because of that nasty H word. My wonderful corn collection had been polluted with hybirds! Not only are some of my corns het for ultra, making them invisible hybirds, but by some reasoning even the homo-normal offspring of a het ultra are hybrids are they not? Or does one single gene out of millions that snakes have the single defining feature of what makes a hybrid?
I'm confused as to why ultra would be called a hybrid even if it came from the mingling of a corn and a grey rat. If I bread a corn and grey rat, the offspring wouldn't be an ultra, would it? This is something very different than say, a jungle corn (a true 50/50). I'd like to make the argument that genes like ultra and tessera, even if they did come from a hybridization, at some point have become and currently are a completely assimilated and normalized "pure" (as pure as one can get) corn snake genes. A 7th generation tessera only contains 1.5% of the origenal tessera, that's 98.5% non-maybe-it-was-a-hybrid-we-don't-know. That sounds reasonable "pure" to me, I don't think hybrid is an applicable word any longer.
Maybe instead of hybrid, we should use a new term like "borrowed". As in: Ultra is a corn snake gene possibly borrowed from grey rat snakes. Tessera is a corn snake morph possibly borrowed form striped king snakes (who may have borrowed it from someone else at some point
.
My question is about % of purity and at which point does a gene, even one borrowed from a some other Pantherophis or a Lampropeltis, ever become assimilated? When does it move from "illegal immigrant" to "naturalized citizen" so to speak?
It seems a common opinion that hybridization happens to some degree in the wild, yet for the most part we still would have to call wild specimens "pure" as there really can't be a higher standard for what a "real" corn snake is other than a normal wild specimen. What percent "pure" then is a wild corn snake? If 100 years ago a random texas rat crossed paths with a seductive corn and offspring was produced, assuming the offspring survived and went on to procreate with the local "pure" corn population, and offspring continued to grow and reproduce on average every five years and at no point did any of the hybrid clutch's decedents ever mingle, you now have a animal that is only 1/500,000th texas rat and 99.9998% pure. You can't even buy gold that pure, and ivory soap doesn't even come close!
But let's say that one hybrid breeding produced a new dominant morph, lets call it "texican" (from our texas rat influence) and our 99.9998% pure clutch are 50% texican. Has texican now become an assimliated morph for pure corn snakes or would they forever be listed as hybrid animals on iansvivarium.com?
I recall almost panicking once upon a time when I heard my precious diffused golddust project (still haven't produced one) was supposedly an abomination to nature because of that nasty H word. My wonderful corn collection had been polluted with hybirds! Not only are some of my corns het for ultra, making them invisible hybirds, but by some reasoning even the homo-normal offspring of a het ultra are hybrids are they not? Or does one single gene out of millions that snakes have the single defining feature of what makes a hybrid?
I'm confused as to why ultra would be called a hybrid even if it came from the mingling of a corn and a grey rat. If I bread a corn and grey rat, the offspring wouldn't be an ultra, would it? This is something very different than say, a jungle corn (a true 50/50). I'd like to make the argument that genes like ultra and tessera, even if they did come from a hybridization, at some point have become and currently are a completely assimilated and normalized "pure" (as pure as one can get) corn snake genes. A 7th generation tessera only contains 1.5% of the origenal tessera, that's 98.5% non-maybe-it-was-a-hybrid-we-don't-know. That sounds reasonable "pure" to me, I don't think hybrid is an applicable word any longer.
Maybe instead of hybrid, we should use a new term like "borrowed". As in: Ultra is a corn snake gene possibly borrowed from grey rat snakes. Tessera is a corn snake morph possibly borrowed form striped king snakes (who may have borrowed it from someone else at some point
.
