Hybrid Pheasants

[Humhill]

Ok, this is all coming from someone new to birds (me) but experienced in breeding other animals (mostly horses and dogs).

Dragon Eggs, you are mostly correct. But, whether or not the produce fertile offspring depends on many more factors. It's very complicated, and I don't have time now to explain (I'm at work

).

Although I will say there are some advantages to hybridization/cross-breeding. Ever heard of hybrid vigor?


Quote:
How? please explain.

Randy,I think that you of all people would understand it,as I have visited your website with all those exotic animals.
One season of crossbreeding explanation.The chicks that you hatch from crossbreeding are not pure birds.In order to get them back close to pure(not pure still)you have to breed the father to the daughter,the second year the father to the daughter of their offspring,the 3rd the father to the daughter of that generation all the way to the 7th year.After the 7th year you have produced a new bloodline,not pure ,new.Now if you are lucky enough to keep the father bird alive for that 7 years,you have a shot at producing 15/16 pure bird.And yet still you never get that pure strain back.
I hope that I have explained it correct,if not someone please clarify it for me.
In N.H.,Tony.

Maybe I'm missing something here and I mean no disrespect. But, why would you want to inbreed so deeply? I realize birds are more tolerant of inbreeding than other animals, but it seems like if there is a defect, this would only serve to accentuate that.

 

[Resolution]

I just spent twenty plus minutes writing a preface to what follows and some sort of operator malfunction of the server has eaten that. I'll have to return to this later.

Difficulty of defining "species" and identifying particular species
Main article: Species problem
The Greenish Warbler demonstrates the concept of a ring species.

It is surprisingly difficult to define the word "species" in a way that applies to all naturally occurring organisms, and the debate among biologists about how to define "species" and how to identify actual species is called the species problem.

Most textbooks follow Ernst Mayr's definition of a species as "groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups".[6]

Various parts of this definition serve to exclude some unusual or artificial matings:

* Those that occur only in captivity (when the animal's normal mating partners may not be available) or as a result of deliberate human action
* Animals that may be physically and physiologically capable of mating but, for various reasons, do not normally do so in the wild

The typical textbook definition above works well for most multi-celled organisms, but there are several types of situations in which it breaks down:

* By definition it applies only to organisms that reproduce sexually. So it does not work for asexually reproducing single-celled organisms and for the relatively few parthenogenetic multi-celled organisms. The term "phylotype" is often applied to such organisms.
* Biologists frequently do not know whether two morphologically similar groups of organisms are "potentially" capable of interbreeding.
* There is considerable variation in the degree to which hybridization may succeed under natural conditions, or even in the degree to which some organisms use sexual reproduction between individuals to breed.
* In ring species, members of adjacent populations interbreed successfully but members of some non-adjacent populations do not.
* In a few cases it may be physically impossible for animals that are members of the same species to mate. However, these are cases in which human intervention has caused gross morphological changes, and are therefore excluded by the biological species concept.

Horizontal gene transfer makes it even more difficult to define the word "species". There is strong evidence of horizontal gene transfer between very dissimilar groups of prokaryotes, and at least occasionally between dissimilar groups of eukaryotes; and Williamson[7] argues that there is evidence for it in some crustaceans and echinoderms. All definitions of the word "species" assume that an organism gets all its genes from one or two parents that are very like that organism, but horizontal gene transfer makes that assumption false.

The question of how best to define "species" is one that has occupied biologists for centuries, and the debate itself has become known as the species problem. Darwin wrote in chapter II of On the Origin of Species:

No one definition has satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species. Generally the term includes the unknown element of a distinct act of creation.[8]

But later, in The Descent of Man, when addressing "The question whether mankind consists of one or several species", Darwin revised his opinion to say:

it is a hopeless endeavour to decide this point on sound grounds, until some definition of the term "species" is generally accepted; and the definition must not include an element that cannot possibly be ascertained, such as an act of creation.[9]

The modern theory of evolution depends on a fundamental redefinition of "species". Prior to Darwin, naturalists viewed species as ideal or general types, which could be exemplified by an ideal specimen bearing all the traits general to the species. Darwin's theories shifted attention from uniformity to variation and from the general to the particular. According to intellectual historian Louis Menand,

Once our attention is redirected to the individual, we need another way of making generalizations. We are no longer interested in the conformity of an individual to an ideal type; we are now interested in the relation of an individual to the other individuals with which it interacts. To generalize about groups of interacting individuals, we need to drop the language of types and essences, which is prescriptive (telling us what finches should be), and adopt the language of statistics and probability, which is predictive (telling us what the average finch, under specified conditions, is likely to do). Relations will be more important than categories; functions, which are variable, will be more important than purposes; transitions will be more important than boundaries; sequences will be more important than hierarchies.

This shift results in a new approach to "species"; Darwin

concluded that species are what they appear to be: ideas, which are provisionally useful for naming groups of interacting individuals. "I look at the term species", he wrote, "as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other ... It does not essentially differ from the word variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for convenience sake." [10]

Practically, biologists define species as populations of organisms that have a high level of genetic similarity. This may reflect an adaptation to the same niche, and the transfer of genetic material from one individual to others, through a variety of possible means. The exact level of similarity used in such a definition is arbitrary, but this is the most common definition used for organisms that reproduce asexually (asexual reproduction), such as some plants and microorganisms.

This lack of any clear species concept in microbiology has led to some authors arguing that the term "species" is not useful when studying bacterial evolution. Instead they see genes as moving freely between even distantly related bacteria, with the entire bacterial domain being a single gene pool. Nevertheless, a kind of rule of thumb has been established, saying that species of Bacteria or Archaea with 16S rRNA gene sequences more similar than 97% to each other need to be checked by DNA-DNA Hybridization if they belong to the same species or not.[11] This concept has been updated recently, saying that the border of 97% was too low and can be raised to 98.7%.[12]

In the study of sexually reproducing organisms, where genetic material is shared through the process of reproduction, the ability of two organisms to interbreed and produce fertile offspring of both sexes is generally accepted as a simple indicator that the organisms share enough genes to be considered members of the same species. Thus a "species" is a group of interbreeding organisms.

This definition can be extended to say that a species is a group of organisms that could potentially interbreed – fish could still be classed as the same species even if they live in different lakes, as long as they could still interbreed were they ever to come into contact with each other. On the other hand, there are many examples of series of three or more distinct populations, where individuals of the population in the middle can interbreed with the populations to either side, but individuals of the populations on either side cannot interbreed. Thus, one could argue that these populations constitute a single species, or two distinct species. This is not a paradox; it is evidence that species are defined by gene frequencies, and thus have fuzzy boundaries.

Consequently, any single, universal definition of "species" is necessarily arbitrary. Instead, biologists have proposed a range of definitions; which definition a biologists uses is a pragmatic choice, depending on the particularities of that biologist's research.

Typological species
A group of organisms in which individuals are members of the species if they sufficiently conform to certain fixed properties or "rights of passage". The clusters of variations or phenotypes within specimens (i.e. longer or shorter tails) would differentiate the species. This method was used as a "classical" method of determining species, such as with Linnaeus early in evolutionary theory. However, we now know that different phenotypes do not always constitute different species (e.g.: a 4-winged Drosophila born to a 2-winged mother is not a different species). Species named in this manner are called morphospecies[13]

Morphological species
A population or group of populations that differs morphologically from other populations. For example, we can distinguish between a chicken and a duck because they have different shaped bills and the duck has webbed feet. Species have been defined in this way since well before the beginning of recorded history. This species concept is highly criticized because more recent genetic data reveal that genetically distinct populations may look very similar and, contrarily, large morphological differences sometimes exist between very closely related populations. Nonetheless, most species known have been described solely from morphology.

Biological / Isolation species
A set of actually or potentially interbreeding populations. This is generally a useful formulation for scientists working with living examples of the higher taxa like mammals, fish, and birds, but more problematic for organisms that do not reproduce sexually. The results of breeding experiments done in artificial conditions may or may not reflect what would happen if the same organisms encountered each other in the wild, making it difficult to gauge whether or not the results of such experiments are meaningful in reference to natural populations.

Biological / reproductive species
Two organisms that are able to reproduce naturally to produce fertile offspring of both sexes. Organisms that can reproduce but almost always make infertile hybrids of at least one sex, such as a mule, hinny or F1 male cattalo are not considered to be the same species.

Recognition species
based on shared reproductive systems, including mating behavior. The Recognition concept of species has been introduced by Hugh E. H. Paterson.

Mate-recognition species
A group of organisms that are known to recognize one another as potential mates. Like the isolation species concept above, it applies only to organisms that reproduce sexually. Unlike the isolation species concept, it focuses specifically on pre-mating reproductive isolation.

Evolutionary / Darwinian species
A group of organisms that shares an ancestor; a lineage that maintains its integrity with respect to other lineages through both time and space. At some point in the progress of such a group, some members may diverge from the main population and evolve into a subspecies, a process that eventually will lead to the formation of a new full species if isolation (geographical or ecological) is maintained.

Phylogenetic (Cladistic)[verification needed]
A group of organisms that shares an ancestor; a lineage that maintains its integrity with respect to other lineages through both time and space. At some point in the progress of such a group, members may diverge from one another: when such a divergence becomes sufficiently clear, the two populations are regarded as separate species. This differs from evolutionary species in that the parent species goes extinct taxonomically when a new species evolve, the mother and daughter populations now forming two new species. Subspecies as such are not recognized under this approach; either a population is a phylogenetic species or it is not taxonomically distinguishable.

Ecological species
A set of organisms adapted to a particular set of resources, called a niche, in the environment. According to this concept, populations form the discrete phonetic clusters that we recognize as species because the ecological and evolutionary processes controlling how resources are divided up tend to produce those clusters.

Genetic species
based on similarity of DNA of individuals or populations. Techniques to compare similarity of DNA include DNA-DNA hybridization, and genetic fingerprinting (or DNA barcoding).

Phenetic species
based on phenotypes.[verification needed]

Microspecies
Species that reproduce without meiosis or fertilization so that each generation is genetically identical to the previous generation. See also apomixis.

Cohesion species
Most inclusive population of individuals having the potential for phenotypic cohesion through intrinsic cohesion mechanisms. This is an expansion of the mate-recognition species concept to allow for post-mating isolation mechanisms; no matter whether populations can hybridize successfully, they are still distinct cohesion species if the amount of hybridization is insufficient to completely mix their respective gene pools.

Evolutionarily Significant Unit (ESU)
An evolutionarily significant unit is a population of organisms that is considered distinct for purposes of conservation. Often referred to as a species or a wildlife species, an ESU also has several possible definitions, which coincide with definitions of species.

In practice, these definitions often coincide, and the differences between them are more a matter of emphasis than of outright contradiction. Nevertheless, no species concept yet proposed is entirely objective, or can be applied in all cases without resorting to judgment. Given the complexity of life, some have argued that such an objective definition is in all likelihood impossible, and biologists should settle for the most practical definition.

For most vertebrates, this is the biological species concept (BSC), and to a lesser extent (or for different purposes) the phylogenetic species concept (PSC). Many BSC subspecies are considered species under the PSC; the difference between the BSC and the PSC can be summed up insofar as that the BSC defines a species as a consequence of manifest evolutionary history, while the PSC defines a species as a consequence of manifest evolutionary potential. Thus, a PSC species is "made" as soon as an evolutionary lineage has started to separate, while a BSC species starts to exist only when the lineage separation is complete. Accordingly, there can be considerable conflict between alternative classifications based upon the PSC versus BSC, as they differ completely in their treatment of taxa that would be considered subspecies under the latter model (e.g., the numerous subspecies of honey bees).​

 

[Jennsbirds]

Indeed. Hybrid peacocks are bred to keep wild populations up and strong.

And look at how beautiful award winning hybrid roses get and how delicious our hybrid plants are.

Then there's us. Many humans carry genes leftover from when we bred with at least two ancestors of homo erectus. Imagine how silly a 'keep the human race pure' slogan would be.

 

[wildlifeartist1]

 

[spectrumranch]

Golden / Ringneck hybrid

Lady Amherst / Ringneck hybrid

 

[Pidgey104]

nice.

 

[Birdman18]

Its interesting to see those hybrids!

 

[pktuan]

Hey Randy, are they real? and you made them? could you explain how to made them? and do you have more pics of them? thanks

 

[pktuan]

Quote:
Did you (or anyone) known: how many percent eggs fertilized when HYBRID? (Reeves/ Ringneck, Silver pheasant/ Ringneck, Ringneck/ Chicken).
Thanks!

 

[Eagle2026]

Those are some different pics.
I can honestly say, " I have never seen anything like that in my entire life!"
Mike

Thank you for putting those up there for us all to see.