"I'm not sure I have enough individuals for an actual scientific study that people would accept... For example, I have 3 Egyptian sand boas which are 50% related, and 5 Tanzanian sand boas, which are only from 2 bloodlines."



For interspecific molecular comparisons, one individual per species is often enough.



" And I'm not even 0 sure of their absolute purity, since some of them are F3 and F3 CB's."



That could be a problem. Interspecific hybrids could be potentially misleading.



"So it was kind of just for my own curiosity. On the other hand I DO live 20 minutes from OSU. Hmph, now you have me thinking about getting ahold of a rubber boa and comparing it to my Calabar 'boa'. I thought that scientists don't do this sort of stuff all the time, I assumed it would be an integral part

of taxonomic studies. But I never read about any of it, so maybe they don't do it."



Rodriguez-Robles et al. use a Calabar boa and a rosy boa as outgroup to their mtDNA analysis of the rubber boa. Others, like Heise et al. (1995), have found that Rhinophis is closely related to Calabaria. Such a relationship seems surprising but it seems to be corroborated by Wilcox et al. (2002), who show that the lineage leading to Eryx and the lineage leading to Rhinophis are sister groups. Unfortunately, Wilcox et al. did not include Calabaria in their analysis so Heise et al.'s findings have not been directly corroborated by Wilcox et al., but only indirectly corroborated if one assumes a close relationship between Calabaria and Eryx. Scientists could definitely benefit from the donation of additional sources of DNA, especially if these sources are reliable. If you were to write them, many will probably gladly accept your donations.

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