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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
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Fri, 8 Jun 2018 23:29:13 -0400
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"This may be the force underlying the tendency of artificially selected species to "revert." "

> I can not think of any examples of domestic animals "reverting" to wild type when they go feral. What is often called reversion is simply mating two domestic breeds ...

I wasn't necessarily thinking of domestic animals. Garden variety vegetables often revert in a generation or two. Domestic animals in most cases have been bred selectively for thousands of years. On the other hand, honey bees seem to lose selected traits quite rapidly, hence the recommendation to re-queen annually with selected stock. 

Here is a discussion of the feralization of domestic animals:

Darwin (1868) noted that the idea of a gradual reversion of domestic animals to a wild form had often been expressed prior to publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. 

Successful feralization should vary among individuals, among breeds and among species. Few researchers would suggest that feral animals can actually reattain the ancestral phenotype, primarily because changes in the gene pool of domestic animals over time preclude identical reversion. 

An evolutionary feralization process may, in fact, take longer than domestication. Haldane (1949) noted that the average rate of phenotypic change in artificially selected populations is markedly faster than the relatively slow rate of evolutionary change in populations of free-living wild animals. 

Daniels, T.J. and Bekoff, M., 1989. Feralization: the making of wild domestic animals. 

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