
New Giant Tortoise Species Found on Galápagos Islands - Mz
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/151021-galapagos-tortoise-new-species-animals-science/
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eggie
The fact that members of all of these groups readily hybridize would violate
some interpretations of the concept of species. The article exposes the
arbitrariness of the concept. Also, mtDNA and microsatellites (short stretches
of repetitive DNA that expand and contract quickly) offer only a fragmentary
picture of genetic history. It is unfortunate that the researchers were not
able to use modern sequencing techniques, but in the case of museum samples
these are sometimes not possible.

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btilly
The existence of ring species says that there must be arbitrariness in
deciding where to draw the line. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species)
for an explanation.

That said, where and when hybridization is possible is a complex question. For
example consider the following pairs of species. (polar bears, brown bears),
(horses, donkeys), (humans, chimpanzees). All are at about the same
evolutionary distance from each other (current estimates are 5 million years,
4.5 million years and 6 million years). The bears happily interbreed, the
equines interbreed but the babies are not generally fertile, and there are no
reports of successful human/chimpanzee crosses. (No reports of anyone
admitting to trying either, but it would be hard to believe that the attempt
was nowhere made.)

Yet in all three cases, biologists generally agree that those are pairs of
distinct species.

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ChrisGranger
I learned of the Ivanov experiments after the topic of hybridization came up
at a blog I used to follow:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ivanovich_Ivanov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ivanovich_Ivanov)

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watson
Misleading title: It sounds like they just found these turtles when in fact
they just researched a group of turtles they already knew about, only to
discover the group consisted of two different species - one of which is then
of cause "new" to science.

But I guess that means that the group which - as far as I remember - was
previously close to extinction before, now is even closer to extinction since
there are even fewer of them left :(

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ck2
I hope they don't do to it what they did to the giant squid when they
discovered that too (kill it).

~~~
Mz
I read several articles on this. My recollection is that conservation of giant
tortoises has been very successful and that identifying this as a separate
species will most likely result in efforts to further increase members of this
specific species. IIRC, it only has 250 members, much lower than the 2000+
members of the group it was thought to be part of. So identifying it as a
separate species is expected to help increase their numbers.

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earless1
I hope these are not as tasty as the first set we discovered

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tychuz
Looks like turtle soup is back on the menu, boys.

