remington
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I am not here to defend it, because frankly I don't know enough about it to have an opinion on the matter. I'm just genuinely curious about the issues with it.
I had no idea about this and read a few articles. That is a scary and sad tale of humanity's wonton destruction for the sake of food export profits.Let me share a true story from the arena of fishkeeping. Back in the 80's, Haplochrimines (family cichlidae) from Lake Victoria were everywhere. They were cheap, colorful, and would interbreed with most sister species. Their availability coupled with the beauty of hybrids made folks not really care.
AND THEN, the incredibly incompetent authorities introduced the Nile Perch to the lake for "sport fishing." These huge eating machines quickly fed upon all the Haplochromines, and suddenly, all the beautiful wild specimens were gone leaving hybridized dead end (viability wise) specimens in the hobby and the loss of literally dozens of species.
If you are not concerned about conservation, I implore you to find a hobby not related to animal husbandry. It sounds harsh, but we're the only thing keeping some species from disappearing sooner rather than later.
Just my 2 cents.
The thousands of cichlids in Africa’s lakes
Evidence for hybrid-driven adaptation is perhaps nowhere more profound than in the warm, tropical waters of Lake Victoria in Africa. There, more than 500 species of bony fishes called cichlids that sport brilliant orange, yellow, and blue hues, roam the lake’s 2,400 cubic kilometers. Some species eat only plants, others eat invertebrates, the bigger species eat other fish, and still more feed on Lake Victoria’s detritus. “There’s incredible diversity of species that live together in the same ecosystem,” evolutionary ecologist Ole Seehausen of the University of Bern tells The Scientist. “This struck me as a beautiful system, the interaction between ecology and evolution . . . to study speciation.”
When Seehausen began to study the lake’s cichlids roughly 30 years ago, it wasn’t clear how the hundreds of species there had evolved. They weren’t geographically isolated, a common driver of speciation. Rather, the fish were all living in the same lake and could interact, yet there was still incredible cichlid diversity. Something else appeared to be driving their speciation.
With continued observation, Seehausen and others found that the barriers preventing the species in the lakes from mating were rather “shallow,” with some of the major ones being behavioral in nature. Males, for example, were defending their territories from males of both the same and other species, or females were choosing flashing mates of only their own species. That last barrier, based on color signaling, began to break down, Seehausen says, when the clarity of the water diminished in the 1990s, a result of wastewater from farms and other human activities polluting the lake. “It turns out that when you change the visual signaling, and the perception of those signals, then not much more is needed to break down reproductive isolation, so many species then hybridize,” Seehausen says.
Something similar appears to have happened thousands of years ago in Lake Victoria. Genetic analyses of the cichlids have revealed that their vast diversity can be traced back to a hybridization of two divergent lineages around 150,000 years ago. And Lake Victoria wasn’t the only body of water in the region where hybridization appeared to play an important role in speciation. Further investigation revealed that cross-species mating had happened and continued to occur in nearby lakes, where it was driving cichlid diversity. “This was replicated in several different lakes across Africa,” Seehausen says.
As scientists began to look for other examples of hybridization in the wild, both past and present, they were not disappointed. Genetic analyses have revealed crosses between coyotes and gray wolves, polar bears and brown bears, chimpanzees and bonobos, finches in the Galapagos Islands, fish called sculpin, and even modern humans and Neanderthals.
Hybrids often have really nasty health problems and 80% of the time theyre sterile.
Thats why there arent too many ligers or tigons its because they cant breed in most cases
I caught one of those a while back while fishing. Half the time they cant even eat properly i was amazed it even got hookedAnd even worse, sometimes they become ungodly ugly staples of a hobby. *Points angrily* at the ubiquitous so-called Parrot cichlid of the aquarium hobby
I'm against it from the standpoint that if they wouldn't breed in the wild, due to geography or any other factors, then they shouldn't be bred in captivity.
Or replace the manual wing windows with larger power windows in 50's cars and trucks. I love the wing windows!People would chop the rear split window out of there corvette in the 60’s. That was a stupid move.