Posted by:
ginter
at Sun Jul 27 14:43:07 2008 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by ginter ]
great point!
In northern Az I have seen several very obvious affinis /deserticola animals. We are talking about some very general attributes like rostral scute widths, dorsocervical patterning, caudal patterns, and saddle counts. Also, I have seen many animals in person and on this forum that are obvious deserticola / pacific gopher (catenifer ) intergrades. Are the classic concepts of species and subspecies too outdated to be applied? Are we seeing a group that was isolated for a period of time via climatic conditions but not long enough to establish solid distinct species and now we are seeing a re-melding of these groups?
I am told that bimaris and anectans co-exhist on the northern baja with very infrequent crossing. And I have seen an animal collected somewhere in Mexico that exhibited a deppei affinis look. I tried hard to track down the locality info on that animal but the grad student who collected it moved on to become a MD and could not remember.........
Grismer suggested that vetebralis and bimares are the same animal and coined the term "pattern class" to describe them however that most receint genetic work by Rodriguez-Robbbles indicates that they are distinct.
I was talking about this very topic with KJ a few weeks ago and he made the point that from a historical perspective if given a big sayi from the Kankakee sand hills and a pale sayi from south western texas you would probably have seperated them as two distinct species or at very least a suspecies.....
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RE: Pituophis sayi??? affinis??? - ginter, Sun Jul 27 14:43:07 2008