The difference is amount of time since the different types last had a common ancestor. For Retics and Masai it is about 1.5 million years or so. Their ranges do overlap and there is minimal to no cross breeding.
The only reason they seem to site for full species is isolation and lack of crossbreeding. But I thought these were requirements for subspecies classification? What's the difference?
Those are also classification criteria for species (depending on which definition you use). The authors of the paper use the fact that there is no geneflow between parapatric populations and therefore could probably be described as separate species (or at the least independent genetic units or evolutionary significant uinits).
I had no idea that the Rothschild`s and Reticulated giraffes in the US were all hybrids.
Does anyoone know if similar genetic research has been done on european giraffes and what the results are? The giraffe EEP labels many of them as pure, and the efforts to stop breeding from the (known) hybrids are pretty sucessful.
