I am wondering how to handle observations that are important due to their introgression. If a specimen is composed of 90% species A, but has 10% species B, but species B is a critically endangered species, or this specimen reflects important past crossing and is important in biogeography and range dynamics, how do we go about this? Maybe traits of species B are not apparent in the field, but lab work showed both species are present. Or, some traits are visible but minor. Do we treat them all as hybrids? Do we treat them as species A but put the info in the description? then would the species B signal be invisible to a search? Or maybe name them species A but put them in a project? My other related question is, what do we do with a 3 species hybrid? Do we have examples of this? what if a Bebb’s oak is crossed with a swamp white oak? or what if a coyote - domestic dog hybrid crosses with a grey wolf?
It looks like you asked the same question here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/hybrid-plants-which-ones-belong-on-inaturalist/75855/23
And got a response that you were happy with.
Can you elaborate on how this question/what you are looking for is different to the previous thread?
I’d probably be inclined to just put them in a separate project, or maybe you can add an Observation Field that makes them easier to find later. Honestly this doesn’t seem like something iNat would be good at dealing with, unless you’re going to add the sequencing data somehow. “Species” versus “hybrids,” gets into species concept arguments and iNat’s not really set up well to deal with all the nuanced considerations. I will say that treating all 90:10 critters as hybrids would open up a bunch of issues for some taxa. E.g., lots of Lepus around the globe show considerable introgression through entire populations (all Snowshoe Hare south of let’s just say roughly Seattle sequence out to Black-tailed Jackrabbit mtDNA).
Like with many things in biology, being hybrid vs non-hybrid is a complicated continuum, and we have to make some arbitrary decisions when sticking things into categories.
Philosophically, there is no concrete answer to what it means to be a “hybrid” since there is no universal definition for “species”.
There are many populations where every single individual has a little bit of ancestry from a different species. In general, something is a hybrid if it has any trace amounts of hybrid ancestry. At some point, there will be little practical value in recognizing something as a hybrid, but technically even an organism with 1 basepair of non-functional DNA from another species is still a hybrid, though there would be no way to detect it as such unless you knew the organism’s pedigree. At the most extreme though, if every member of a species is a hybrid under that most inclusive definition, the term “hybrid” ceases to have any practical utility.
For people studying hybrids, it is useful to have them labelled and separated out into a separate category, so a good rule of thumb is probably that if you are able to detect any hybrid ancestry, put it in the hybrid bin, even if it’s only 10% from the other species. When entire species have a little bit of hybrid ancestry though, you could instead shift your strategy to only put them in the hybrid bin if they clearly have more hybrid ancestry than average for other members of their population.
There will be exceptions. Black morph Eastern Grey Squirrel are thought to have gotten their dark morph DNA from ancient hybridization with Fox Squirrel, and Pomarine Jaeger probably got their dark morph DNA from the larger skuas. However, it would not be useful to around identifying all dark morph grey squirrel and Pomarine Jaegers as hybrids. I guess in the face of a messy world without clear-cut boundaries, it is best to do what is the most practical and useful for a given situation.
Hello, I decided to create a post on this because the comment I made on introgression was on a thread that did not involve introgression in the title, and it was already marked as ‘‘solved’’. It was suggested to me that I would have reached very few people with it, and that I should make a post on the topic instead. There are a few people working on this project and they felt it deserves a post so that it can be better archived and get more responses and opinions. This is also a very important topic