Bob Blaylock
Diamond Member
- Banned
- #61
It's been a few years but I once saw an educational/documentary type show about frogs. The video was about two separate species of frogs that lived in the same habitat. The frogs looked alike so for years they all were considered the same species; however the two species had different mating calls so that they did not interbred with each other... so they were then labeled separate species of frogs. Other than the distinct mating call of each "species" the frogs looked like they could be the same species.
I would think that one kind not choosing to mate with the other kind, due to differences such as a mating call, would not be proof that they are not the same species.
What it would take to prove whether these frogs are the same species or different species would be to either somehow get one kind to mate with the other, or perhaps use some for of artificial fertilization to fertilize one frog's eggs with sperm from the other kind, and see if you can get viable offspring. You'd then need to similarly try to breed those offspring, and see if they have any limitations as for their interbreedability. A quick bit of Googling tells me that like mammals, frogs use the XY/XX method of sex determination, so per Haldane's rule, female frog hybrids might be fertile, but males would be sterile.
In many cases, similar but different species can be mated, and produce hybrid offspring. But hybrids have limited fertility, if any at all. I used to be under the misconception that all hybrids are sterile, but it turns out that in some cases, they are not. Among felines, for example, female hybrids can successfully mate with either parent species, and produce even further hybridized offspring, but male feline hybrids are sterile. There's a zoo somewhere in Russia that has some liligers. They have a female liger (a hybrid produced by a male lion mating with a female tiger), who has, herself, successfully mated with a lion and produced liligers as offspring.