INTERGRADES - Your Thoughts

[waruikazi]

here's my mut heheheheh

 

[zard]

You actually get sick of this thread coming back month after month, and no one ever seems to listern, but I will try to sort this out again, specialy for the beginners.

Hybrids. Hybrids are not natually occurring animals, but are continally created by irresponsable keepers. This is were one species like a Diamond is bred to a Carpet for example. The young are just mongrels and this practice is ILLEGAL in most states of Australia. These are cross species.

Intergrades. For some reason people think intergrades have occurred natually in the wild were somehow, many years ago, a Diamond bred with a Carpet where their borders mixed. If you are in this group you are also wrong.

Let the class begin. I will use the Carpet Python as it has the best known intergrades. The Eastern Carpet Python,(morelia spilota) according to DNA evidence is the same species wether it be the PNG, Top End, Cape York, Jungle, Coastal, Murray/Darling or Diamond. As the origional ancesters of this species moved into Australia and spread out around the eastern states, it has had to adapt to different climatic and geographical areas. The result of these changes have left us with the distinct subspecies that are listed above.

Nowhere in Australia is there a area where one subspecies just magically turned into the next. This was a suttle change, and in most areas it took many hundreds of kilometers for the changes to fully occur. These buffer zones between the 2 distinct sub species are known as the intergrade zones.

The best known of these is found in mid coast NSW. Starting just north of Coffs Harbour the Coastal Carpet starts it's transformation into the Diamond Python which finally fully appears at around Newcastle and extends to just over the Vic border. When looking at morelia spilota found in the area from Coffs to Newcastle you can see they share both charactoristics. The closer to Coffs, the more they resemble the Carpet that they started from. The closer to Newcastle, the more they resemble the Diamond that they are slowly turning into. The prettiest I have seen in this area occurr around Port Macquarie, and IMO can be far prettier than any Diamond i have ever seen, as well as being far more hardier in Captivity

Even though morelia spilota are deemed the same species by DNA, each subspecies can still be identified by slight variations in the DNA. This also includes the intergrades which have been found to differ from their origionals.

The best thing people can do to learn is to get off their computors, get into a car and travell around Australia and actually learn where you favourite species are found and to look a natual changes as they occur.

so well said needed to be repeated methinks.

 

[moosenoose]

He's a picture of my dog Teddy, he's a hybrid

 

[nickamon]

Natural intergrades are fine with me, but hybrids are not.

 

[dragon_tail]

Most snakes given the chance to select a partner out of masses in the wild will almost always go with their own species. Its only in an enclosed environment with only one option where MOST hybridisation happens. The coastal/diamond intergrade is naturally occuring more and more frequently at port maquarry and surrounds (overlapping range) by choice of the animals involved, there is no shortage of either species there! In my own little opinion this is not accidental, nor is it barstedisation! we are simply lucky enough to live in a period and a geographical location where we are able to watch nature birth a new species..... do you think there was ALWAYS hundreds if not thousands of species of python?

sorry if this has been posted before, ui didnt really read all three pages, but all i want to say is:
who gives the authority to humans to question the process of nature? granted in a glass tank with no other choice or room to seperate hybridisation borders on peverse, but by the snakes own inbuilt natural selection mechanism in the open wild in an abundance of both species? i call that following a dilligent design.

another quick thought, perhaps strayed from the above? diamond desease! all you nature doco buffs will know that it wouldnt be the first time globally a species of any animal chose to intergrade instinctively for the benefit of a larger gene-pool, in 90% of these cases (that ive seen documented) the species of animal choosing to intergrade has an inherit desease- and intergrades as a survival mechenism! (see: weird nature, discovery channel)

 

[little guy]

Are you telling me that my pythons should not exist you are the person that is wrong.
If you think that something that happens natually in the world should be gone .that sounds like hitler.And look what he did .I have used a natural intergrade to educate thousands of children over the year's with out my mungrel they would have not had the pleasure of feeling a snake in a safe environment. Give me a break you call you self a snake lover.
You can not cross a dog with a cat as nature wont let it happen
you can cross carpet pythons cant you as they are all the same thing it is only a color change to cope with the environment they live in.
If you cross a horse with a donkey you get a mule. Mules cant reproduce carpets can funny that hey must just be that mungrel jean.
I dont cross them but i do keep intergrades look them up you might learn something.
And if you think my intergrade is wrong then we will agree to disagree.

 

[dragon_tail]

if that was directed at me you didnt read my post!

 

[little guy]

No dragon tail it was not aimed at you .

 

[Bug collector]

i think theyre hot

 

[Trev72]

Ok to summerise my question earlier on if I bred a Atherton Jungle with a Palmerston Jungle would you guys consider them Hybrid, as they seem to have the same scientific name but in the example of Morelia Spilota it is considered hybrid so it that case the scientific names are ignored.

 

[waruikazi]

Ok to summerise my question earlier on if I bred a Atherton Jungle with a Palmerston Jungle would you guys consider them Hybrid, as they seem to have the same scientific name but in the example of Morelia Spilota it is considered hybrid so it that case the scientific names are ignored.

IMO you would have a non-locale specific jungle. But i'm not real good on jungles so i don't know how far apart Atherton table lands are and the Palmerston jungle, so who knows with further study they could become recognised as distinct sub species.

 

[nightowl]

IMO, crossing 2 separate locale jungles is not hybridising, as they both have the same classification (Morelia spilota cheynei). However, they could not be classed as a locale specific jungle (obviously).

A hybrid is the result of crossing different species or SUB species ie, to cross a diamond (Morelia spilota spilota) with a coastal (Morelia spilota mcdowelli)... or a Jungle (Morelia spilota cheynei) with a diamond (Morelia spilota spilota) etc etc etc....

 

[dragon_tail]

diamond/coastal is an intergrade.

 

[Greebo]

diamond/coastal is an intergrade.

*sigh* No, it is not.A Diamond X Coastal is a hybrid.

 

[swingonthespiral]

IMO you would have a non-locale specific jungle. But i'm not real good on jungles so i don't know how far apart Atherton table lands are and the Palmerston jungle, so who knows with further study they could become recognised as distinct sub species.

all i know about the locale is that palmerston is the highway that runs through atherton so i'd say (only been in nth qld for a year but i dont think palmerston is actually a place plz correct me if im wrong) that they would naturally be closely related anyway....

 

[moosenoose]

FIGHT YOU MONKEYS FIGHT!!!! :lol: :lol:

Let's face it, whether you agree or you don't agree, half the newbs out there don’t know whether they are buying a diamond or a jungle. Even to me some of the boundaries seem blurred, so what hope does a newcomer have?? ZERO! What will happen, and is happening in places that allow the practices of hybridization to occur is the creation of designer animals, and guess what? The market is loaded with them because they are proving popular to new hobbyists.

I hope the purer forms remain in plentiful supply, I honestly do, but I wouldn’t turn down an attractive hybrid based on an opinion that underlines cutting off ones nose to spite the face. In choosing to hack off that nose I have no doubt you’d be standing there feeling fantastic about yourself, but you will be pretty much alone. Times are changing, if they weren’t this topic wouldn’t exist

 

[dragon_tail]

True True

 

[WeLovePythons]

Can people please stop saying "intergrade/hybrid" and "intergrade/cross".
THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING!!!!!!!!!
The diamond/coastal intergrade is its own sub-species, thats what this thread was about, NOT HYBRIDS!

No wonder so many newbies think they are just crosses, look where this thread is going

The end result is the same...If I put an Intergrade next to a hybrid are YOU going to be able to tell the difference?? The answer is NO. No one can that is the thing. So for the purpose of this thread they are the same. No one can complain or say anything about Integrades as they are a totally natural animal. As for dogs of two breeds not being Hybrids please explain how they aren't and then put your reasoning to Herps and see what you come up with. As for Labradoodles and all the others they are now a recognised "seperate" breed so there for seperate from Labradors and poodles. The idea that there will no longer be pure breed labrodors or similar because of cross breeding is ludicris as like herps there will always be those who only want pure strains. Oh and by the way unless you personally caught the original breeding herps how can anyone garuntee the pure lineage of any herps in captivity? All anyone has to go on is the word of the breeders from where they purchased their herps.

 

[Serpant_Lady]

not a fan of the hybrids - althopugh i may like an individual snake or two i would never knowingly breed them. intergrades are a whole other ball game. If they naturally occur thats great but human influence is always a problem, such as selling inters as pure breeds. it happens a fair bit out there. i will always be a fan of breeding pure to the locality but these things sometimes cant be.

AND I HATE breeders messing with years of good dog genes and then flogging off labradoodles and the like - you may have a very good cute pet but I dont agree with what the breeders have done
JMO

 

[Greebo]

The end result is the same...If I put an Intergrade next to a hybrid are YOU going to be able to tell the difference?? The answer is NO. No one can that is the thing. So for the purpose of this thread they are the same.

Just because they may look similar doesn't mean that the difference is insignificant. A Diamond and a Cubic Zirconian may look the same but they are not the same thing. It is important that people in our hobby know what these terms mean. They should not simply be casually dismissed as insignificant.