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"Four sexes" sounds click-baitier than "two morphs." It's not like they have unique procreation, other than effectively two subspecies whom cannot interbreed (t
by throwaway4891a 10y ago
"Four sexes" sounds click-baitier than "two morphs." It's not like they have unique procreation, other than effectively two subspecies whom cannot interbreed (they both have males and females respectively). It's interesting a species can diverge with a large mutation and split the gene pool suddenly. More intriguing is how enough of a population could grow from the first individual and thrive.
EDIT: gotta make you wonder if there were a large forest fire, volcano, human hunters or other event that almost wipe them out, and that the survivors went through a population bottleneck, perhaps picking up the mutation along the way.
- colanderman 10y agoNo, it's very different than two subspecies. The males of one morph almost exclusively mate with females of the other morph, and produce offspring which are one of the four sexes in roughly equal proportion.
- kseistrup 10y agoDo we know that they “almost exclusively mate with females of the other morph” or is it just because same-morph matings are infertile?
- drcross 10y agoWhat consenting morphs do in the privacy of their own nests is none of your business.
- matt_morgan 10y agoThe article isn't explicit on that, but they did observe the birds for 30 years, so maybe it's in the paper.
- qb45 10y agoThe paper says 1.5% of pairs were indeed between the same morphs. No mention of infertility, but white/white pairs produce 1/4 of chicks with both 2nd chromosomes mutated and the only male chick of this kind they found was 50% underweight runt, though two such females grew up as normal white adults.