Reminds me of the time my daughter was telling a story about our cat while the cat was on my lap and she got to the part where she makes a meow sound and our (usually very serene) cat suddenly jumped up and stared at her on full alert as if to say *Tf you just call me??*
If they are anything like house-cats they'll maul you to death.
The only thing that makes your average orange cat safe to be around is the fact that they are too small to kill you.
I like cats, but i know that they are basically small tigers
Idk but I’ve seen a guy who raises and cares for them and they’re apparently not as dangerous as you might think. They’re not really aggressive to humans, in fact the guy I mentioned literally sleeps with them sometimes. If i remember correctly, there has only ever been one recorded cheetah death and it was a captive one with shitty caretakers. Also beside that, they’re not that big. On average smaller than a person, hell I’ve met dogs bigger than the biggest recorded cheetah. Basically what I’m sayin is I would absolutely demolish a cheetah and by that metric I think we should be able to own them.
pretty much all animals go right for the jugular, if they don't it is because they are going for a limb to take you to the ground so they can then go for the jugular.
Large bears don't give a shit because they're so big that don't need to have non-moving prey, so they just start eating without killing first. But they also aren't megapredators, they just eat literally anything they can find.
I'm sitting here thinking about this.
When you're that size you need a lot of calories. Couple that with needing to spend a lot of time stocking up on said calories to survive the next hibernation cycle, and your every snack needs a serious ROI consideration. You are kind of forced to be a lazy eater. So, yeah, you eat whatever you can find and with minimal exertion unless you're getting a mondo pile of meat and/or calories out of it.
Cheetahs don't rip open jugulars like big cats. Their jaws are pretty weak. Cheetahs almost exclusively suffocate their prey and you're more into danger of a dog bite than a cheetah. You can definitely overpower a cheetah, they are the size of a medium sized dog and have pretty fragile bones.
Cheetahs have been kept as hunting companions in the past, likely the only reason we don't have domesticated cheetahs is they are not easy to breed and are very fragile genetically. They also are likely to suffocate a young child but that is more of a thing that could have been domesticated out of them like wolves.
Basically the only reason cheetahs didn't get the dog treatment is as a species they suffer from a ton of problems due to a population bottle neck that happened thousands of years ago. Hard to breed, prone to anxiety, and not even that useful besides acting like a sight hound.
> Cheetahs don't rip open jugulars like big cats. Their jaws are pretty weak.
Shouldn't it require less strength to slice open a throat with something sharp than clamp down on it to suffocate them?
Cheetahs kill by running down their prey, small gazelles, and tripping them and then suffocating them with a throat bite when they're grounded. They don't just jump up to the height of a humans neck with a clean shot. They're optimized for speed, not kill power. That's also why they basically get their food stolen every time.
Cheetahs have been kept as pets for many hundreds of years and could be found in America as pets even through the 20s and 30s. They are easily tameable and make perfectly fine pets.
Dunno if it was a cheetah but your comment reminded me of a story my mom told about when i was young, that she had a friend with a big cat (think it was a tiger) and how they had to feed 2 full fridges worth of meat a day to keep it fed, well guess what 3-5 year old gremlin me decided to do one time we visited, get into the pen to try to pet the big cat and by some miracle i wasn't eaten before my mom noticed me and got me out of there
Serious question: How do you objectively measure how close two organisms are related?
I mean, taxonomy seems a bit wobbly compared to mathematics.
And just saying a specific percentage of genetic resemblance seems to be unspecific too, right? There’s very different genes, some matter a lot, making an organism very different, others probably don’t make much of a difference, right?
So, how do you objectively measure that?
You don’t really, at least not for that purpose. Rank is purely arbitrary and should not be taken all that seriously. It’s a tool of convenience. For a lengthy ramble packed with citations about the topic, [see here](http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/Research/APweb/top/introductionnew.htm#Classification). Here is a brief excerpt to give a bit of an overview (Stevens is wordy…):
> The only thing that the rank terminations used (-ales, -aceae, etc.) suggest is relative inclusion relationships of groups of species in the local hierarchy. If we are talking about a monophyletic group, say Ericaceae, and Vaccinioideae are mentioned, then the latter must refer to a clade contained within the former, but neither is necessarily comparable with Polemoniaceae and Cobaeoideae, or any other family-subfamily combination. All are monophyletic groups (I hope - but see below), but that is all they have in common. Taxa at the same rank are equivalent only by designation and have nothing necessarily in common other than - perhaps - they’remonophyly. Rank as used here has no meaning other than signifying a monophyletic group that includes other monophyletic groups with appropriately subordinate rank terminations. Even sister taxa have only age and their immediate common ancestor and its ancestors necessarily in common. The non-equivalence of taxa at the same rank has long been clear (Darwin 1859; see also e.g. Seberg 1989; Stevens 1997; Bertrand et al. 2006; Giribet et al. 2015 and references), although they have sometimes been compared (Ricklefs & Renner 1994), if almost unconsciously, as in comments like "Orchidaceae are a very speciose family".
And then:
> It is sometimes suggested that taxa at the same rank should have a similar level or number of morphological and/or molecular similarities or differences, or be based on similar characters, or be similar in these respects to taxa elsewhere in a larger clade under consideration (Heenan & Smissen 2013 for an example). This will lead to name instability if used in taxa where such criteria had not previously been used, especially if attempts are then made to extend such criteria beyond the local group of interest, and they may also imply that taxa at the same rank are equivalent and comparable in a biological context (for an example, see Fritsch et al. 2008). Of course, equivalencies in morphological and/or molecular differences are unlikely to be fixed (new apomorphies will continue to be found, or what were thought to be apomorphies turn out not to be) or easily quantifiable (especially with molecular data coming from different genomes). It has also been suggested that rank could reflect the age of the clade (e.g. Hennig 1966; Holt & Jønsson 2014; Eguchi & Tamura 2016). However, to say that dating clades is still a difficult enterprise is very much an understatement (see below),
And:
> Indeed, taxa at the same rank are unfortunately still sometimes treated as if they were equivalent by those attempting to understand evolutionary or biogeographic problems (e.g. Ricotta et al. 2012), and some still worry about the properties of genera (e.g. Strand & Panova 2014). Hendricks et al. (2014) discuss the (mis)use of the generic rank by palaeontologists. Interestingly, in the middle of the last century, at least, taxonomists thought that the rank of genus was more "real" or "natural" than that of species (Anderson 1940), but a recent (rather small) survey suggests that opinions have flipped, with most thinking species are more "real" (Barraclough & Humphreys 2015), although discussions about "reality" are somewhat passé. However, when thinking about species and speciation, note that the general lineage species concept (de Queiroz 1998, 2007) and its descendants make a clear distinction between species concepts and the criteria that can be used to recognise species in connection with particular concepts. Indeed, coupling the uncertainty over what might be an individual (e.g. an apomictic dandelion; different parts of an ancient clone that now have no organic connection; incorporation of the microbiome associated with plants), and the availability of massive amounts of data (e.g. Novikova et al. 2016: Arabidopsis and relatives), means that deciding on the limits of species, let alone applying concepts such as monophyly to them, is becoming increasingly difficult (see also e.g. Freudenstein et al. 2016b; Zachos 2016; Barraclough 2019 for general discussions about species).
Like I said, wordy. But if you want to know more about the phylogeny of plants, there aren’t really many better sources.
Edit: he must have been so incredibly smug as he typed this:
> The non-equivalence of taxa at the same rank has long been clear (Darwin 1859)
Thanks. That’s unfortunately pretty much what I had already assumed based on my very limited layman understanding and of which I hoped that would not be the case.
Personally, I think it’s exciting. People often think of taxonomy as being boring, essentially “stamp collecting”, making lists and dumping things in categories. That’s the goal, sure, but the base level questions remain unanswered. We don’t even know what a species is. We don’t even know what an *individual* is.
Apomixis, hybrid introgression, reticulate evolution, direct horizontal gene transfer across widely separate groups, and many other complications mean that those nice simple cladograms you may have seen in high school bio, or freshman bio, are laughably incomplete, and basically lies we tell to children.
Totally agree! Unironically, it’s the suspense that is killing me! I wish, there was answers to quench the thirst for understanding and it’s frustrating how our human understanding of the universe is yet only just beginning to unfold.
It’s crazy that we have this seemingly vast amount of knowledge, yet so fundamental questions remain unanswered - and sometimes even seem to become LESS answered as science advances.
That’s what makes me the most excited about biology, and science in general. If you keep persistently asking “why” questions, you start running out of answers really fast, and if you keep at it, you realize that what you thought you knew doesn’t actually make sense. It’s truly endless, nothing is truly “boring”, even the most boring things have fractal detail.
A species are really closely related together. A genus are also related together but a little bit less closely, they share one common ancestor but it’s a bit more distant. Grey Wolf (*Canis lupus*) is a species. *Canis* is the genus. The genus *Canis* also includes coyotes, jackals, and dogs as well as wolves. A genus usually contains several species. In turn, a family usually contains several genuses (genii?).
It depends on who you ask. Some scientists think there’s enough difference to categorize them as a separate species while others don’t and just consider dogs a sub species
The joys of taxonomy and having to relearn families every now and then
To add onto other comments, you probably know that the human species of "Homo sapiens", but there used to be other species in the "Homo" genus. For exemple, "Homo neanderthalisis", the Neanderthals!
The distinction between two species is still hard though. The "simple" definition we learn in schools is that a species are the individuals who can reproduce and have a fertile offspring (ex: a donkey and a horse can have a baby, a mule, but its infertile), but sometimes, well they can reproduce. A real biologist will tell you that the concept of species really is a fuzzy one that doesn't really have a clear definition. Most of the time its pretty clear cut, but not always.
As for genus, it's essentially "the upper echelon in the hierarchy". You also have families, like the Canidae, the Felidae, etc... then orders (Primates is an easy one), Classes (Mammals), Phylum (Chordates, essentially vertebrates + some other things) and finally Kingdom (Animalia). But there are also many subcategories for all of these because it wasn't complex enough!
Sometimes. They like to make it complicated for us. Generally, it won’t commonly happen in nature. If they commonly interbreed to produce fertile offspring under natural conditions, they’ll usually be considered one species. But, for example, coyotes have increasingly started to interbreed with wolves in eastern North America over the last few decades due to human pressures. They very rarely used to do that naturally. But even though the offspring are fertile, they’re called two different species.
Or for plants, [this is a lily](https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/10/2018/08/13eb5e79-afd9-4a40-9801-d878d2dc591b-0673b65.jpg), and this one [is a daylily](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/561c58f4e4b0e7e06ea3dd67/1563888582907-NOPPUD1H1WGITSGB2SKP/1.jpg). Those are not the same species, genus, family, or even *order*. The only thing they have in common is being monocots.
[Lotus](https://nas.er.usgs.gov/XIMAGESERVERX/2019/20190924100048.jpg) and [water lily](https://www.gardenia.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/nymphaea-marliacea-rosea.webp) don’t even have that in common, lotus is a dicot, while water lily is a ridiculously primitive plant down in the magnoliids, but they both make lily pads and similar flowers. Lotus is more closely related to macadamia nuts and sycamore trees…
Huh, weird, works on my end, iPhone with safari. [Heres a different picture](https://kiefernursery.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Nymphaea-Peach-glow.jpg), maybe that will work.
Are these considered examples of convergent evolution? For anyone unfamiliar, it’s the concept of how totally different forms of life can evolve to have similar features because of natural selection favoring those traits. The classic example is sharks and dolphins converging on such similar fin structures - 2 pectoral fins, a dorsal fin, and a wide tail - despite the only shared step in their evolutionary history is that they’re all vertebrates.
That could make sense for these cases- perhaps a pollinator evolved to seek out one of the lilies, and the other converged to look similar to compete. Or lily pads being an advantageous structure for a water based plant to gather more sunlight and attract pollinators.
Yup, those are both classic dramatic cases of convergent evolution. Not really sure what’s up with the lily/daylily thing, but it being pollinator related is most likely. As for water lilies and lotus? Same. Both pollinated by beetles, both practice pollinator entrapment where the beetles get locked in when the flower closes at night, both have self heating flowers for the beetles (only Victoria I think for the water lilies) both have an intense sickly sweet fragrance that is common in beetle flowers. Likewise, the lily pad thing just makes sense for an emergent aquatic plant.
The thing is, there are loads of emergent aquatic plants, with different flower and leaf strategies. It’s not weird that unrelated plants picked similar strategies for flowers or leaves, but it’s weird that they picked almost the exact same strategies for both flowers *and* leaves. They also both produce aporphine, an unusual alkaloid that causes a somewhat dreamy state of sedation. Why does having lily pads mean you have to have distinctive beetle trapping flowers and a specific chemical profile? There’s probably a reason, but I have no idea why. A wild ass guess would be that some aquatic herbivore, maybe a carp or something, is prone to eating aquatic plants, and also extra vulnerable to that one alkaloid.
Thanks for the detailed reply! Wish I’d taken biology past 9th grade and had learned about these examples sooner. All the water lily similarities are particularly fascinating.
That said, the term “big cat” doesn’t actually differentiate based on size, but rather whether or not they can roar. Snow leopards are big cats but they’re more akin to cheetahs size wise.
Well, dogs aren't natural animals that evolved in the wild, they were selectively bred by humans for specific traits. That's why they look - and act - so different.
But the variety of dogs’ phenotypes is *tremendously* larger than domesticated cats. It has more to do with canine vs feline DNA, especially the much larger amount of “junk” DNA in canines.
Put simply, they can change more dramatically within fewer generations than cats. Hence chihuahuas and Rottweilers vs. munchkins and Maine coons.
If you took some coyotes and some bobcats, you’d probably have a coyote population domesticated much more quickly than the cats.
Well I think a huge element is also that dogs were also bred for work purposes originally. We have never bred cats towards a job, mostly just kept them as they are. Hell keeping cats indoors was also rare. Indoor only cats are a relatively recent phenomena in cat usage (60-80 years or so). Mostly they kept outside and just bred uncontrollably. Dogs? Were specifically bred for work, and then eventually also for cosmetics.
So its just an industry that has existed way way longer than it has for cats.
I think the cat’s role and level of involvement with humans affected the human attention paid toward selective breeding. Cats were mostly left to fuck off and pick off pests at their own leisure. Whereas dogs become intimately involved in the work they performed with humans, like hunting, shepherding, and guarding.
Last I heard, cats first domesticated eating rodents around gain storage in what would later become northern China. It was a mutually beneficial relationship more than the tight bond that the wolves whose decedents became dogs formed with their humans. Could explain why cats mostly still act like they don’t need us
Yeah because they were much more tampered and ‘man made’ when breeding them than cats. House cats are so much more closer and stable when compared to their wild ancestors.
Ok.
The mangrove tree is living in saltwater, therefore where the tide rises and sinks.
In the tree ants live.
Tide rises.
Ants want their nests to not be flooded.
Specialised ant with big head puts it in opening and inflates head.
Nest is sealed til rise sink again.
BUT:
Oxygen levels might get critical.
Ants evolved to change metabolism so they can survive with less oxygen for some time.
Understand this.
Marvel about ants and nature.
Get ant tattoo.
Die in peace.
Really? So, and I’m at the outer reaches of my understanding here, if insects are limited in size because the holes in their bodies that they breathe though are very inefficient at anything bigger than what they are, could ants that have evolved to need less oxygen grown really, really big?
Jesus, all that thinking hurt. I’m going to sit in the shade and have some very alcoholic cider. Phew.
OH, I feel dumb now. Thanks for making it so clear with an example. For some reason I didn’t realise they meant things like male ants/queen ants having wings, or the those cool big headed ants you mentioned haha.
Thank you, will consider ant tattoo.
What's interesting to me is I can see a breed of dog I've never seen before and immediately know "yep that's a dog."
They look so different, and yet, somehow they all look like dogs.
It is estimated that dogs were domesticated 23,000 years ago and we started selectively breeding dogs at least 9500 years ago to potentially 20,000 years ago.
Well would be good to get to know some basics of genetics OP. Start with genotype and phenotype that will quickly get you understanding why this is the case.
Yes, except that [ligers are fertile](https://www.google.com/search?q=fertile+ligers&oq=fertile+ligers&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyCQgAEEUYORiABDIKCAEQABgPGBYYHjINCAIQABiGAxiABBiKBTINCAMQABiGAxiABBiKBTIKCAQQABiABBiiBDIKCAUQABiABBiiBDIKCAYQABiABBiiBDIKCAcQABiABBiiBNIBCDIyMzRqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
Biology is weird.
Dogs are the same species because they can create viable/fertile offspring. While lions and tigers can create offspring such as ligers their offspring are infertile so they are not the same species.
You actually can’t! In addition to hundreds of generations of selective breeding, dogs have an unusually large amount of phenotypic plasticity. Prime example why dogs come in so many shapes and sizes but cats usually just come in cat.
I mean the part about dogs may be true, but the reason cats don't look different is no one is trying to actively breed them outside of a *very* small selection of cat breeders.
Cat breeds make up like at most 10% of the cat population and the rest are just making babies however. Dog breeding are a much much higher number. So it makes sense that even though they are both domesticated, only one looks different because of breeding.
Yes, biology is funny. Like how for example "species" is a word without a real set definition. The biological species concept differentiates them based on whether they can produce fertile offspring, but this is useless when it comes to classifying, say, extinct animals, and fails to take into account grolar bears and coywolves, which are fertile hybrids of animals that we do consider different species in everyday parlance. In this case, though, it does apply. Ligers are not fertile hybrids, but chi-dane-danes are. And despite so much external difference, all the different breeds of dog really are more closely related to each other, both genetically and evolutionarily, than all the different species of big cat are to one another. That's the real mindblow here.
Exactly this. The idea of species falls apart when so many plants and animals can easily so hybridize and produce fertile, healthy offspring. A great exmaple of this is the Sturddle Fish, a hybrid between the American Paddlefish and Russian Sturgeon, seperated by millions of years, on a different continent and in two different taxonomic families. However, I'm not actually sure if they're fertile because the Sturddlefish is a recent discovery, but there are other examples of Extrageneric hybrids that are fertile, one would be the entire Pythonidae family.
To a zoologist, reptiles (in the common sense, if birds are excluded) and fish actually make no sense! They are called "paraphyletic groups". Or else, you have to group things in that really don't seem to make sense, birds are reptiles and humans are fish!
(In reality, "fish" are condrichtyans (sharks mostly), sarcopterygians (coelacanths, these "living fossil" fishes) and actinopterygians (essentially all the other fish you can think of). Reptiles are lepidosaurians (lizards), testudines (turtles) and crocodilia (crocodiles). Though "reptilia" is an existing groups, but that one does indeed contain birds, which are in fact the last remaining dinosaurs)
The big cats can all (sometimes) interbreed, but their offspring are sterile. They are a good example of a speciation in progress. They are not quite separate species yet, or perhaps it would be better to say they are just barely separate species. If the above dogs were separated physically/genetically from each other, they would eventually turn into new species too.
dogs can breed with other dogs and can have kids that can continue the species, but if you breed a lion with a tiger you get something that can't continue the species because it can't have babies of its own
Cheetahs are fascinating because they are essentially just really big small cats.
The Great Dane of house cats, if you will, but feral.
They still have the ability to purr and meow and even generally enjoy the company of people and sometimes even dogs.
Not only that, but a cheetah isn’t even in the same Genus as the other three.
and in fact more closely related to your house cat than to the others to the left.
They can purr and are the only ones that can’t retract their claws!
[and meow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tmCIsSpvC8)
I clicked this link and within seconds one of my cats jumped into my lap and started sniffing my phone. Like she actually understood
she’s making sure you know who’s cuter
Reminds me of the time my daughter was telling a story about our cat while the cat was on my lap and she got to the part where she makes a meow sound and our (usually very serene) cat suddenly jumped up and stared at her on full alert as if to say *Tf you just call me??*
That's so cuuute!
I just want to scritch their ears
If they are anything like house-cats they'll maul you to death. The only thing that makes your average orange cat safe to be around is the fact that they are too small to kill you. I like cats, but i know that they are basically small tigers
Nature's perfect murderer comes in many sizes.
If dangerous, why friend shaped?
Not dangerous *because* friend shaped
I wanna belly wub
that's a good meow, or a pet me meow or I miss meow or I'm gonna get mauled because I try to give it kisses
🥰😍🥰😍🥰😍🥰😍
Soooo, can one adopt a Cheetah? Askin’ for a friend
Idk but I’ve seen a guy who raises and cares for them and they’re apparently not as dangerous as you might think. They’re not really aggressive to humans, in fact the guy I mentioned literally sleeps with them sometimes. If i remember correctly, there has only ever been one recorded cheetah death and it was a captive one with shitty caretakers. Also beside that, they’re not that big. On average smaller than a person, hell I’ve met dogs bigger than the biggest recorded cheetah. Basically what I’m sayin is I would absolutely demolish a cheetah and by that metric I think we should be able to own them.
IIRC captive cheetahs sometimes get emotional support dogs to make them less scared
I absolutely love that piece of information
https://www.reddit.com/r/PlanetZoo/comments/158kchg/so_when_do_we_get_emotional_support_dogs_for_the/
This link has made my night ten times better
when a cheetah attacks he goes right for the jugular so maybe you got a chance but I won't bet on that
Naaaaaaahh... If a cheetah attack you, just run away from it. 😏
[удалено]
Unlike the ironically named sloth
Fasth
Never have I been one upped so thoroughly by something that builds off of my initial joke
How can you expect to beat a cheetah in a race when they're literally named because of how often they cheat?
Also a guy from Boston named them.
If I have cheetah blood in me, I am not a cheetah!
If It goes for the throat, kick it in the groin
They're easily spotted.
pretty much all animals go right for the jugular, if they don't it is because they are going for a limb to take you to the ground so they can then go for the jugular.
Yep, except chimpanzees. Those mfers are nasty when they want to do damage
Someone quickly post a video about a chimpanzee ripping off woman's face
Large bears don't give a shit because they're so big that don't need to have non-moving prey, so they just start eating without killing first. But they also aren't megapredators, they just eat literally anything they can find.
I'm sitting here thinking about this. When you're that size you need a lot of calories. Couple that with needing to spend a lot of time stocking up on said calories to survive the next hibernation cycle, and your every snack needs a serious ROI consideration. You are kind of forced to be a lazy eater. So, yeah, you eat whatever you can find and with minimal exertion unless you're getting a mondo pile of meat and/or calories out of it.
Cheetahs don't rip open jugulars like big cats. Their jaws are pretty weak. Cheetahs almost exclusively suffocate their prey and you're more into danger of a dog bite than a cheetah. You can definitely overpower a cheetah, they are the size of a medium sized dog and have pretty fragile bones. Cheetahs have been kept as hunting companions in the past, likely the only reason we don't have domesticated cheetahs is they are not easy to breed and are very fragile genetically. They also are likely to suffocate a young child but that is more of a thing that could have been domesticated out of them like wolves. Basically the only reason cheetahs didn't get the dog treatment is as a species they suffer from a ton of problems due to a population bottle neck that happened thousands of years ago. Hard to breed, prone to anxiety, and not even that useful besides acting like a sight hound.
> Cheetahs don't rip open jugulars like big cats. Their jaws are pretty weak. Shouldn't it require less strength to slice open a throat with something sharp than clamp down on it to suffocate them?
dull claws, dull teeth.
Cheetahs kill by running down their prey, small gazelles, and tripping them and then suffocating them with a throat bite when they're grounded. They don't just jump up to the height of a humans neck with a clean shot. They're optimized for speed, not kill power. That's also why they basically get their food stolen every time.
Bonus on their unretractable claws that end up being way less sharp than even house cats so you don't get a new scar everytime you play with your pet
> Basically what I’m sayin is I would absolutely demolish a cheetah With hugs?
Trial by combat
I choose kisses as weapons. 😻
>Basically what I’m sayin is I would absolutely demolish a cheetah Poor choice of words
Is he gonna raise him, bathe him and name him Jason Statham?
Or train him to make him these beats?
They have been tamed, even used for hunting. They don't breed very well in captivity, maybe that's why they never were domesticated
I thought they were back in the day? Like way wayyy back in the day Nvm never technically tamed just kept as pets for thousands of years
Depends on where you live probably, but be prepared, they are still wild animals within.
IF NOT FRIEND, WHY FRIEND SHAPED
Cheetahs have been kept as pets for many hundreds of years and could be found in America as pets even through the 20s and 30s. They are easily tameable and make perfectly fine pets.
If it's legal where you live, and you have enough land for them to run, then yes. They are no danger to adult humans.
Dunno if it was a cheetah but your comment reminded me of a story my mom told about when i was young, that she had a friend with a big cat (think it was a tiger) and how they had to feed 2 full fridges worth of meat a day to keep it fed, well guess what 3-5 year old gremlin me decided to do one time we visited, get into the pen to try to pet the big cat and by some miracle i wasn't eaten before my mom noticed me and got me out of there
Serious question: How do you objectively measure how close two organisms are related? I mean, taxonomy seems a bit wobbly compared to mathematics. And just saying a specific percentage of genetic resemblance seems to be unspecific too, right? There’s very different genes, some matter a lot, making an organism very different, others probably don’t make much of a difference, right? So, how do you objectively measure that?
You don’t really, at least not for that purpose. Rank is purely arbitrary and should not be taken all that seriously. It’s a tool of convenience. For a lengthy ramble packed with citations about the topic, [see here](http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/Research/APweb/top/introductionnew.htm#Classification). Here is a brief excerpt to give a bit of an overview (Stevens is wordy…): > The only thing that the rank terminations used (-ales, -aceae, etc.) suggest is relative inclusion relationships of groups of species in the local hierarchy. If we are talking about a monophyletic group, say Ericaceae, and Vaccinioideae are mentioned, then the latter must refer to a clade contained within the former, but neither is necessarily comparable with Polemoniaceae and Cobaeoideae, or any other family-subfamily combination. All are monophyletic groups (I hope - but see below), but that is all they have in common. Taxa at the same rank are equivalent only by designation and have nothing necessarily in common other than - perhaps - they’remonophyly. Rank as used here has no meaning other than signifying a monophyletic group that includes other monophyletic groups with appropriately subordinate rank terminations. Even sister taxa have only age and their immediate common ancestor and its ancestors necessarily in common. The non-equivalence of taxa at the same rank has long been clear (Darwin 1859; see also e.g. Seberg 1989; Stevens 1997; Bertrand et al. 2006; Giribet et al. 2015 and references), although they have sometimes been compared (Ricklefs & Renner 1994), if almost unconsciously, as in comments like "Orchidaceae are a very speciose family". And then: > It is sometimes suggested that taxa at the same rank should have a similar level or number of morphological and/or molecular similarities or differences, or be based on similar characters, or be similar in these respects to taxa elsewhere in a larger clade under consideration (Heenan & Smissen 2013 for an example). This will lead to name instability if used in taxa where such criteria had not previously been used, especially if attempts are then made to extend such criteria beyond the local group of interest, and they may also imply that taxa at the same rank are equivalent and comparable in a biological context (for an example, see Fritsch et al. 2008). Of course, equivalencies in morphological and/or molecular differences are unlikely to be fixed (new apomorphies will continue to be found, or what were thought to be apomorphies turn out not to be) or easily quantifiable (especially with molecular data coming from different genomes). It has also been suggested that rank could reflect the age of the clade (e.g. Hennig 1966; Holt & Jønsson 2014; Eguchi & Tamura 2016). However, to say that dating clades is still a difficult enterprise is very much an understatement (see below), And: > Indeed, taxa at the same rank are unfortunately still sometimes treated as if they were equivalent by those attempting to understand evolutionary or biogeographic problems (e.g. Ricotta et al. 2012), and some still worry about the properties of genera (e.g. Strand & Panova 2014). Hendricks et al. (2014) discuss the (mis)use of the generic rank by palaeontologists. Interestingly, in the middle of the last century, at least, taxonomists thought that the rank of genus was more "real" or "natural" than that of species (Anderson 1940), but a recent (rather small) survey suggests that opinions have flipped, with most thinking species are more "real" (Barraclough & Humphreys 2015), although discussions about "reality" are somewhat passé. However, when thinking about species and speciation, note that the general lineage species concept (de Queiroz 1998, 2007) and its descendants make a clear distinction between species concepts and the criteria that can be used to recognise species in connection with particular concepts. Indeed, coupling the uncertainty over what might be an individual (e.g. an apomictic dandelion; different parts of an ancient clone that now have no organic connection; incorporation of the microbiome associated with plants), and the availability of massive amounts of data (e.g. Novikova et al. 2016: Arabidopsis and relatives), means that deciding on the limits of species, let alone applying concepts such as monophyly to them, is becoming increasingly difficult (see also e.g. Freudenstein et al. 2016b; Zachos 2016; Barraclough 2019 for general discussions about species). Like I said, wordy. But if you want to know more about the phylogeny of plants, there aren’t really many better sources. Edit: he must have been so incredibly smug as he typed this: > The non-equivalence of taxa at the same rank has long been clear (Darwin 1859)
Thanks. That’s unfortunately pretty much what I had already assumed based on my very limited layman understanding and of which I hoped that would not be the case.
Personally, I think it’s exciting. People often think of taxonomy as being boring, essentially “stamp collecting”, making lists and dumping things in categories. That’s the goal, sure, but the base level questions remain unanswered. We don’t even know what a species is. We don’t even know what an *individual* is. Apomixis, hybrid introgression, reticulate evolution, direct horizontal gene transfer across widely separate groups, and many other complications mean that those nice simple cladograms you may have seen in high school bio, or freshman bio, are laughably incomplete, and basically lies we tell to children.
Totally agree! Unironically, it’s the suspense that is killing me! I wish, there was answers to quench the thirst for understanding and it’s frustrating how our human understanding of the universe is yet only just beginning to unfold. It’s crazy that we have this seemingly vast amount of knowledge, yet so fundamental questions remain unanswered - and sometimes even seem to become LESS answered as science advances.
That’s what makes me the most excited about biology, and science in general. If you keep persistently asking “why” questions, you start running out of answers really fast, and if you keep at it, you realize that what you thought you knew doesn’t actually make sense. It’s truly endless, nothing is truly “boring”, even the most boring things have fractal detail.
The more we know, the more we realize what we don’t know. Science rules
Same with pumas.
Cheetahs definitely have that snoot you just want to boop
Jaguards do too.
I was going to say exactly that but i just didn't know that and i also don't even know the meaning of Genus.
A species are really closely related together. A genus are also related together but a little bit less closely, they share one common ancestor but it’s a bit more distant. Grey Wolf (*Canis lupus*) is a species. *Canis* is the genus. The genus *Canis* also includes coyotes, jackals, and dogs as well as wolves. A genus usually contains several species. In turn, a family usually contains several genuses (genii?).
If you care about Latin, genera.
Fuck third declension. All my homies hate third declension.
I can't believe it's not butter
I live for tense jokes.
Fuck third declension, yes, but what about fourth declension
Dogs and wolves are both canis lupus.
I thought dogs are canis familiaris?
I think it’s often written *Canis lupus familiaris*.
Whoa. Easy there Potter.
The spell didn't even work.
***Always***
It depends on who you ask. Some scientists think there’s enough difference to categorize them as a separate species while others don’t and just consider dogs a sub species The joys of taxonomy and having to relearn families every now and then
It's always lupus ...wait wrong kind of lupus
Not so. There's also several subspecies of canis lupus
well yeah but they are the same species, that’s what he was saying not that they were the exact same thing.
Its never Lupus
And if you're in the same genus, can you reproduce with one another?
Possibly but generally your offspring will be infertile.
Oh really? So like a dog/wolf is infertile?
No because they are both canis lupus, contrary to what the other poster said.
Oh what about a Liger?
To add onto other comments, you probably know that the human species of "Homo sapiens", but there used to be other species in the "Homo" genus. For exemple, "Homo neanderthalisis", the Neanderthals! The distinction between two species is still hard though. The "simple" definition we learn in schools is that a species are the individuals who can reproduce and have a fertile offspring (ex: a donkey and a horse can have a baby, a mule, but its infertile), but sometimes, well they can reproduce. A real biologist will tell you that the concept of species really is a fuzzy one that doesn't really have a clear definition. Most of the time its pretty clear cut, but not always. As for genus, it's essentially "the upper echelon in the hierarchy". You also have families, like the Canidae, the Felidae, etc... then orders (Primates is an easy one), Classes (Mammals), Phylum (Chordates, essentially vertebrates + some other things) and finally Kingdom (Animalia). But there are also many subcategories for all of these because it wasn't complex enough!
Sometimes. They like to make it complicated for us. Generally, it won’t commonly happen in nature. If they commonly interbreed to produce fertile offspring under natural conditions, they’ll usually be considered one species. But, for example, coyotes have increasingly started to interbreed with wolves in eastern North America over the last few decades due to human pressures. They very rarely used to do that naturally. But even though the offspring are fertile, they’re called two different species.
It means cheetahs are really smart!
Are you stupid? It means they’re really really smart.
How dumb ARE you? It means they grant wishes.
Wait a a second….Cheetah…..cheetos, Cheetah….Cheetos…..there’s sooo much beauty in the world!
You are also really smart, a Genus!
I see you also like to visit the gas station while high at 2 am.
Or for plants, [this is a lily](https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/10/2018/08/13eb5e79-afd9-4a40-9801-d878d2dc591b-0673b65.jpg), and this one [is a daylily](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/561c58f4e4b0e7e06ea3dd67/1563888582907-NOPPUD1H1WGITSGB2SKP/1.jpg). Those are not the same species, genus, family, or even *order*. The only thing they have in common is being monocots. [Lotus](https://nas.er.usgs.gov/XIMAGESERVERX/2019/20190924100048.jpg) and [water lily](https://www.gardenia.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/nymphaea-marliacea-rosea.webp) don’t even have that in common, lotus is a dicot, while water lily is a ridiculously primitive plant down in the magnoliids, but they both make lily pads and similar flowers. Lotus is more closely related to macadamia nuts and sycamore trees…
Idk if it's a virus link or something but the water lily link seems to pop up with a lot of funky text on mobile, with no image.
Huh, weird, works on my end, iPhone with safari. [Heres a different picture](https://kiefernursery.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Nymphaea-Peach-glow.jpg), maybe that will work.
Are these considered examples of convergent evolution? For anyone unfamiliar, it’s the concept of how totally different forms of life can evolve to have similar features because of natural selection favoring those traits. The classic example is sharks and dolphins converging on such similar fin structures - 2 pectoral fins, a dorsal fin, and a wide tail - despite the only shared step in their evolutionary history is that they’re all vertebrates. That could make sense for these cases- perhaps a pollinator evolved to seek out one of the lilies, and the other converged to look similar to compete. Or lily pads being an advantageous structure for a water based plant to gather more sunlight and attract pollinators.
Yup, those are both classic dramatic cases of convergent evolution. Not really sure what’s up with the lily/daylily thing, but it being pollinator related is most likely. As for water lilies and lotus? Same. Both pollinated by beetles, both practice pollinator entrapment where the beetles get locked in when the flower closes at night, both have self heating flowers for the beetles (only Victoria I think for the water lilies) both have an intense sickly sweet fragrance that is common in beetle flowers. Likewise, the lily pad thing just makes sense for an emergent aquatic plant. The thing is, there are loads of emergent aquatic plants, with different flower and leaf strategies. It’s not weird that unrelated plants picked similar strategies for flowers or leaves, but it’s weird that they picked almost the exact same strategies for both flowers *and* leaves. They also both produce aporphine, an unusual alkaloid that causes a somewhat dreamy state of sedation. Why does having lily pads mean you have to have distinctive beetle trapping flowers and a specific chemical profile? There’s probably a reason, but I have no idea why. A wild ass guess would be that some aquatic herbivore, maybe a carp or something, is prone to eating aquatic plants, and also extra vulnerable to that one alkaloid.
Thanks for the detailed reply! Wish I’d taken biology past 9th grade and had learned about these examples sooner. All the water lily similarities are particularly fascinating.
Benus
Not even the same subfamily. Cheetahs are felinae rather than pantherinae.
They aren't even "big cats" They are pretty small actually.
That said, the term “big cat” doesn’t actually differentiate based on size, but rather whether or not they can roar. Snow leopards are big cats but they’re more akin to cheetahs size wise.
Acinonyx.
Well, dogs aren't natural animals that evolved in the wild, they were selectively bred by humans for specific traits. That's why they look - and act - so different.
But the variety of dogs’ phenotypes is *tremendously* larger than domesticated cats. It has more to do with canine vs feline DNA, especially the much larger amount of “junk” DNA in canines. Put simply, they can change more dramatically within fewer generations than cats. Hence chihuahuas and Rottweilers vs. munchkins and Maine coons. If you took some coyotes and some bobcats, you’d probably have a coyote population domesticated much more quickly than the cats.
Well I think a huge element is also that dogs were also bred for work purposes originally. We have never bred cats towards a job, mostly just kept them as they are. Hell keeping cats indoors was also rare. Indoor only cats are a relatively recent phenomena in cat usage (60-80 years or so). Mostly they kept outside and just bred uncontrollably. Dogs? Were specifically bred for work, and then eventually also for cosmetics. So its just an industry that has existed way way longer than it has for cats.
Cats were held to get rid of pests like rats and mice
I think the cat’s role and level of involvement with humans affected the human attention paid toward selective breeding. Cats were mostly left to fuck off and pick off pests at their own leisure. Whereas dogs become intimately involved in the work they performed with humans, like hunting, shepherding, and guarding.
Which they (probably) weren’t bred for (by humans), but which they just did.
Last I heard, cats first domesticated eating rodents around gain storage in what would later become northern China. It was a mutually beneficial relationship more than the tight bond that the wolves whose decedents became dogs formed with their humans. Could explain why cats mostly still act like they don’t need us
Cats self-domesticated, a relatively uncommon trait.
“Cat usage”
House cats and barn cats have long been used to hunt rats, mice etc.
Yeah because they were much more tampered and ‘man made’ when breeding them than cats. House cats are so much more closer and stable when compared to their wild ancestors.
It kinda like how we got different ants like one that huge, one that live in the trees or some that has wings but are still the same species.
One that has a giant head used as a door
What?
Ok. The mangrove tree is living in saltwater, therefore where the tide rises and sinks. In the tree ants live. Tide rises. Ants want their nests to not be flooded. Specialised ant with big head puts it in opening and inflates head. Nest is sealed til rise sink again. BUT: Oxygen levels might get critical. Ants evolved to change metabolism so they can survive with less oxygen for some time. Understand this. Marvel about ants and nature. Get ant tattoo. Die in peace.
>Get ant tattoo. Preferably on abdomen with head on penis to be able to simulate specialised ant inflating its head.
Really? So, and I’m at the outer reaches of my understanding here, if insects are limited in size because the holes in their bodies that they breathe though are very inefficient at anything bigger than what they are, could ants that have evolved to need less oxygen grown really, really big? Jesus, all that thinking hurt. I’m going to sit in the shade and have some very alcoholic cider. Phew.
OH, I feel dumb now. Thanks for making it so clear with an example. For some reason I didn’t realise they meant things like male ants/queen ants having wings, or the those cool big headed ants you mentioned haha. Thank you, will consider ant tattoo.
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Was gonna say title should read eugenics instead of biology lol
Just like the brassicas!
What's interesting to me is I can see a breed of dog I've never seen before and immediately know "yep that's a dog." They look so different, and yet, somehow they all look like dogs.
It is estimated that dogs were domesticated 23,000 years ago and we started selectively breeding dogs at least 9500 years ago to potentially 20,000 years ago.
It's due to selective breeding over thousands of years
Yes, we domesticated and interbred the one for hundreds of Trillions of years, the other is a wild animal. *Edited for accuracy
“Hundreds of trillions of years” is crazy
"Trillions" is also wildly false lol.
Not sure why someone downvoted you. The universe itself is estimated to be about 14 billion years old.
And we're really sure about that number too which is the amazing thing
To be fair, other domesticated animals aren't as different from each other as dogs are within the same species.
Didnt know we have been domesticating dogs for over three orders of magnitude longer than the universe has existed lmfao
Dog breeding only became a thing about 500 years ago. Before that almost all dog breeds did not exist.
Edited for accuracy?? The universe is less than a trillion years old
Well would be good to get to know some basics of genetics OP. Start with genotype and phenotype that will quickly get you understanding why this is the case.
Why wouldn't OP know some basics of genetics based on this post?
Because only me am very smart, OP very dumb, but me smart me know the basics of genetics.
When people brag that they don't need science and they "did their own research," this is the kind of misinformed thing we get.
How is this misinformed?
Viable offspring that can also reproduce vs viable offspring that cannot.
Yes, except that [ligers are fertile](https://www.google.com/search?q=fertile+ligers&oq=fertile+ligers&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyCQgAEEUYORiABDIKCAEQABgPGBYYHjINCAIQABiGAxiABBiKBTINCAMQABiGAxiABBiKBTIKCAQQABiABBiiBDIKCAUQABiABBiiBDIKCAYQABiABBiiBDIKCAcQABiABBiiBNIBCDIyMzRqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) Biology is weird.
Usually fertile. Same with with female tigons. Biology do be weird.
Dogs are the same species because they can create viable/fertile offspring. While lions and tigers can create offspring such as ligers their offspring are infertile so they are not the same species.
That leopard is staring at me like I owe it money.
Better pay it back
Except the top doesn't naturally occur, you could selective breed anything into being very different given enough generations.
You actually can’t! In addition to hundreds of generations of selective breeding, dogs have an unusually large amount of phenotypic plasticity. Prime example why dogs come in so many shapes and sizes but cats usually just come in cat.
Except you can, the generations number would just be very large
[удалено]
You are going to run into mechanical restraints must faster with cats is my point—health issues regardless of inbreeding.
I mean the part about dogs may be true, but the reason cats don't look different is no one is trying to actively breed them outside of a *very* small selection of cat breeders. Cat breeds make up like at most 10% of the cat population and the rest are just making babies however. Dog breeding are a much much higher number. So it makes sense that even though they are both domesticated, only one looks different because of breeding.
You're confusing (implicitly) natural and artificial selection.
How is he confusing it?
Yes, biology is funny. Like how for example "species" is a word without a real set definition. The biological species concept differentiates them based on whether they can produce fertile offspring, but this is useless when it comes to classifying, say, extinct animals, and fails to take into account grolar bears and coywolves, which are fertile hybrids of animals that we do consider different species in everyday parlance. In this case, though, it does apply. Ligers are not fertile hybrids, but chi-dane-danes are. And despite so much external difference, all the different breeds of dog really are more closely related to each other, both genetically and evolutionarily, than all the different species of big cat are to one another. That's the real mindblow here.
Exactly this. The idea of species falls apart when so many plants and animals can easily so hybridize and produce fertile, healthy offspring. A great exmaple of this is the Sturddle Fish, a hybrid between the American Paddlefish and Russian Sturgeon, seperated by millions of years, on a different continent and in two different taxonomic families. However, I'm not actually sure if they're fertile because the Sturddlefish is a recent discovery, but there are other examples of Extrageneric hybrids that are fertile, one would be the entire Pythonidae family.
Today I learned chicken are reptilian.
To a zoologist, reptiles (in the common sense, if birds are excluded) and fish actually make no sense! They are called "paraphyletic groups". Or else, you have to group things in that really don't seem to make sense, birds are reptiles and humans are fish! (In reality, "fish" are condrichtyans (sharks mostly), sarcopterygians (coelacanths, these "living fossil" fishes) and actinopterygians (essentially all the other fish you can think of). Reptiles are lepidosaurians (lizards), testudines (turtles) and crocodilia (crocodiles). Though "reptilia" is an existing groups, but that one does indeed contain birds, which are in fact the last remaining dinosaurs)
They both eat bug.
They both Egg
Crocodiles are more closely related to chickens than to lizards.
If you look past surface level things the similarities between bird and crocs are huge in comparison to Lizards and Crocs.
Aka Mother Nature vs dog breeding
Selective breeding baby
Birds dude, they all seem to me like they should be able to interbreed, but quess what? There are no bird races there are only bird species…
Genotype ≠ phenotype
lol that pug
Pugs are people though
They're all felines though
All this proves is we need selective bred big cats to make even better big cats
The big cats can all (sometimes) interbreed, but their offspring are sterile. They are a good example of a speciation in progress. They are not quite separate species yet, or perhaps it would be better to say they are just barely separate species. If the above dogs were separated physically/genetically from each other, they would eventually turn into new species too.
Taxonomy.
Also humans and chimps are closer relatives of each other than lions are to tigers.
dogs can breed with other dogs and can have kids that can continue the species, but if you breed a lion with a tiger you get something that can't continue the species because it can't have babies of its own
Now do humans.
Whenever I see posts about species like OP's I assume its just a dogwhistle for racist or idorts
Or young earth creationists.
And my Chihuahua thinks he's a lion 🦁
Who compares domesticated and wild animals, what next compare a chickens to an eagles?
Human selection vs natural selection
Interesting issue, but perhaps the answer is here- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/different-dog-breeds-same-species/
What about “ligers”? Genuine question.
Cheetahs are fascinating because they are essentially just really big small cats. The Great Dane of house cats, if you will, but feral. They still have the ability to purr and meow and even generally enjoy the company of people and sometimes even dogs.
Yeah peoples' attempts and putting things into groups are often flawed
A cat is a cat, dang it! I’ll die on this hill.
Me when artifical vs natural selection
Nah what’s funny is thinking this is interesting or deep
Not biology but inbreeding