What is the difference between a intergrade and a hybrid?
Hybrids. Hybrids are not natually occurring animals, but are continally created by irresponsable keepers. This is were one species like a
Diamond is bred to a Carpet for example. The young are just mongrels and this practice is ILLEGAL in most states of Australia. These are cross species.
Intergrades. For some reason people think intergrades have occurred natually in the wild were somehow, many years ago, a Diamond bred with a Carpet where their borders mixed. If you are in this group you are also wrong.
Let the class begin. I will use the Carpet Python as it has the best known intergrades. The
Eastern Carpet Python,(morelia spilota) according to DNA evidence is the same species wether it be the PNG, Top End, Cape York,
Jungle,
Coastal, Murray/Darling or Diamond. As the origional ancesters of this species moved into Australia and spread out around the eastern states, it has had to adapt to different climatic and geographical areas. The result of these changes have left us with the distinct subspecies that are listed above.
Nowhere in Australia is there a area where one subspecies just magically turned into the next. This was a suttle change, and in most areas it took many hundreds of kilometers for the changes to fully occur. These buffer zones between the 2 distinct sub species are known as the intergrade zones.
The best known of these is found in mid coast NSW. Starting just north of Coffs Harbour the Coastal Carpet starts it's transformation into the
Diamond Python which finally fully appears at around Newcastle and extends to just over the Vic border. When looking at morelia spilota found in the area from Coffs to Newcastle you can see they share both charactoristics. The closer to Coffs, the more they resemble the Carpet that they started from. The closer to Newcastle, the more they resemble the Diamond that they are slowly turning into. The prettiest I have seen in this area occurr around Port Macquarie, and IMO can be far prettier than any Diamond i have ever seen, as well as being far more hardier in Captivity
Even though morelia spilota are deemed the same species by DNA, each subspecies can still be identified by slight variations in the DNA. This also includes the intergrades which have been found to differ from their origionals.
The best thing people can do to learn is to get off their computors, get into a car and travell around Australia and actually learn where you favourite species are found and to look a natual changes as they occur.
