I only really know about Joseph’s and Lee Goodwin’s wild crosses. From what I understand, in terms of ancestry Joseph’s ‘Wildings’ are … 50% lyc. 25% pen. 25% hab., is that right? And does anyone have the percentages on the other lines? I think I read somewhere for example that the Q series for example had more domestic percentage but I can’t find the details despite searching.
Then Lee has several, such as Dwarf Hirsutum, Wild Gem, Wilderness etc. but I can’t find any info on what the percentages are. He told me they’re all crossed with hab. (LA1777) but I have seen speculation from others that Wild Gem might be crossed with … was it corn. or chm.? But never seen that confirmed.
Other people also cross with pimp. and others. But I never see any percentages. I’d be really interested. Partly because I’m wondering whether to give future space to some 50/50 domestic/wild crosses or focus more on crossing the F1s with other domestics or domestic-wild hybrids such as from Joseph or Lee’s tomatoes.
I can’t know the percentages of wild in my populations, because I encourage bee facilitated promiscuous pollination. If you want to put a number on it, use 33%.
Exserted orange = 50% habrochaites
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Wildling contains more wild genes than Q series, and includes pimpinellifolium.
It seems @WilliamGrowsTomatoes believes the Exserted Orange to be full domestic. Is there reason to doubt that?
Ah, interesting, I didn’t realise they had pimp. in them too, thought that was only the ‘4 species’ ones! And, would that make the ‘4 species’ ones around 62% wild then?
By the way I made many crosses with one ‘4 species’, though it has taken a long time to mature to ripen the fruits, and, while they are very pretty yellow/orange fruits, they are quite sour. One other has red fruits, not as sour but still rather sour. I grew it only very small and didn’t make crosses with it. one more outside, yet to see about that, though unfortunately it doesn’t have exsertion, which the yellow one did have.
Oh wow sounds exciting! I’d be interested to hear how the fruits look (green? Cracked?) and how they taste - like, an eating line of aimed at further breeding?
The more promiscuously cross pollinating, the more joy I receive from a variety. I changed my personality to fully embrace the promiscuous nature of my tomatoes. I deliberately chose the path of natural pollination, and minimal records, in order to honor the plants natural promiscuity. I don’t try to control nor dominate the plants. They do what they want.
Definitions may vary. I consider pimpinellifolium, cheesmanae, and galapagense to be domestic tomatoes… (I lump like things together, rather than splitting them over trivial differences). I allow other people to think of them as wild.
That seems to me a curious view, to chose to consider a species which was not domesticated, and not eaten by people (e.g. galapagense), hence undergone its entire trajectory of evolution in the absence of any domestication or human selection, as ‘domestic’.
One of the joys of having no formal botany training, involves the ability to observe with my own senses, without taint from formal schooling. Then I get to draw my own conclusions about my observations.
My book, and the promiscuous tomato project wouldn’t exist if I had followed the “educated” path.
My mixed-up cherry size tomatoes are the result of a completely random cross with what used to be my current tomatoes. This is the first year in several that I have any of the little, tiny ones that look like the original currents. The old regular current ones still grow wild in the weeds around the yard, just not in the garden.
I also have a new one that I haven’t seen before, a nice sized cluster of tomatoes about the size of golf balls, the biggest that have ever showed up. Only some small tear-drop shape ones are ripe so far and they are very tasty except for the yellow ones. Weird, the round and sort of flat yellow ones that show up sometimes are always good, but the tear-drop shape yellow ones are always yucky.
I don’t know how wild they are, but only the original currents and a variety of more domestic tomatoes did it on their own.
I think you just took the word domestic too literal and you missed his point. He’s said before that the biologists definition of calling things that freely interbreed as different species doesn’t really make much sense. I think that’s great insight on his part and I think I agree with him.
Imagine calling wild horses and caged horses different species. Does that makes sense?
I take mild exception to this rhetoric the same as I do to some similar rhetoric that Bill McDorman employs sometimes when I have heard him speak. Botany is both my academic training to the tune of approximately the equivalent of 40 semester credits and my professional title when I am at work is “botanist”. So the thing I would like to say about that is that traditionally botany and specifically plant identification is an open field. That means that anyone, regardless of formal training, can become a botanist simply by doing the work of botany. The more classical approach is to read H.D. Harrington’s fine book “How to Identify Plants” then purchase a flora and a vasculum and ride one’s bicycle out to the local canal and begin a plant collection with much snail mail correspondence with other botanists including plant specimens for identification. Eventually anyone could and still can become an acknowledged expert botanist. The modern equivalent is to become a bit addicted I suppose to contributing both photographs of plants and plant identifications to the Inaturalist app and there is a fine cadre of incipient expert botanists who have done just that.
Joseph, I believe, has an undergraduate degree in chemistry just as I have one in biology. That makes us educational peers- and means Joseph can really not claim to be innocent of advanced scientific training as an undergraduate degree is actually quite advanced education in the history of our species. Though he may not have read the same tomes as a biology, botany, or horticulture major he could well understand them (and I suspect based on his fine discourse and citations that he has read quite a few tomes and scientific papers that belie his denials). The best undergraduate schools (judging by the botany techs I have supervised that they disgorged) now immerse their students directly in the scientific papers on these subjects which I know based on our citations that we all peruse.
Joseph’s rather extreme lumping of the four closely related “red” tomatoes is not however beyond the reach of taxonomy. He is simply a strict adherent to the Biological Species Concept which I must admit was the most compelling of those presented in Highschool Biology in the mid 90’s. Taxonomic rules if those were lumped would probably place them all into the first named of the three wild species with the domestic species probably being considered merely a domesticated variety of Solanum pimpinillifolium. So if that first named wild species was Solanum pimpinillifolium that would make all four species subspecies or varieties of that one. Modern taxonomists clearly are not strict adherents to the biological species concept and are taking additional conceptual models into consideration when they split these four taxa. Such as morphology, genetic distance, geographic barriers (The Pacific Ocean), and probably others.
My own wild crosses vary from 50% to 12.5% but actually complications with natural pollination and the fact that in some instances I started with tomatoes from Joseph’s promiscuous project mean that some of my 50% plants are actually 5/8ths and that unknown to me there could easily be 75% wild plants in with my 50% wild plants. I intend to make some 75% wild plants (habrochaites) this year if I can remember to get it done!
In the case of Exserted Orange Joseph himself had early doubt that the isolation block that produced the cross was isolated enough and thought that perhaps it had been infiltrated with something like a bit of Sungold F1. I think I retained that initial doubt to the present day. If I recall correctly, Joseph, especially after seeing some of the elites he obtained around 2020, reconsidered his initial doubt. My evidence towards my view would be my row of F2 Solanum habrochaites x Promiscuous which are 5/8 wild with perhaps some cryptic 75% or so wild plants in the mix. They show no sign of domestication- as did a similar population that was supposed to be 75% domestic (though may have actually contained some higher percentage wild plants) several years back! A recent single flower cross of Exserted Orange to LA2329 Solanum habrochaites failed and I have to wait for more flowers (or transport pollen to more plants) to try again, but it seems like a logical cross to make to me.
Regardless of pedigree percentage the crossing over, step of genetic division in sexual reproduction coupled with selection for domestic traits will lead to plants with a higher percentage of domestic DNA than their pedigrees may suggest.
This coming season I hope to do some backcrosses to create (again, seed parent first):
tom 75%/habro 25%,
habro 75%/tom 25%.
In case this last one doesn’t work, I’ll use the tom 25%/habro 75% to create habro 87.5%/tom 12.5%. I want habro cytoplasm in my tomato population.
I will also just plant the hybrids among tomatoes and leave it the pollinators to mix things up. I will be selecting for exserted stigma and/or very open flower structure (not fused anther cone) but not strongly at this early stage. I don’t really care about obligate outcrossing. As long as outcrossing is more likely than not, I’ll be content.
Thanks William. I concede. I guess I can’t claim ignorance. I read every book about science available in my elementary, middle, and high school, regardless of field of study. I never stopped reading voraciously. I did it as an outsider. Except for math, chemistry, and physics, no gatekeepers tested me to make sure I only regurgitated the accepted orthodoxies. My fickle understanding can change at any moment. I gained a deep distrust of science by working as a synthetic and analytical chemist for two decades.
I consider Bill McDorman among my most important teachers and sources of inspiration. Lovely to me if we employ similar rhetoric to try to get people to fixate less on what we can’t know (or think we know but don’t really) and pay more attention to the magic.
I choose to look at biology as fuzzy and indefinite. I find it difficult to communicate without rhetoric to people that want it to clear, distinct, and fragmented. I live in a different world view, with a different type of biology.
I had to look up wild horses, and found this:
“The wild horse (Equus ferus) is a species of the genus Equus, which includes as subspecies the modern domesticated horse”
I’ve never heard of ‘caged horses’ and google just seemed to show me horses in cages, but if you are referring to domesticated horses, then since they are the same species but have just undergone the process of domestication and become a sub-species over the course of around 6,000 years of domestication, it makes sense to not consider them a different species, depending on the criteria one is using. And after all, we use criteria for all words we use, not just scientific ones - if we did not differentiate between words and categories then we would have no language. And just to note, we are talking about wild, not feral horses. Feral horses would not even be a different subspecies from domestic horses.
However, galapagense seems to have diverged from the other tomato species about 1 million years ago:
Thus, divergence time of S. galapagense can be estimated to have occurred roughly one million years ago, when Floreana and Santa Cruz, the last of the eastern islands without S. galapagense, became a suitable habitat for life. These estimates are consistent with previous reports by Nesbitt and Tanksley (2002), who suggested that the initial radiation of the genus Lycopersicon occurred over seven million years ago, and that S. lycopersicum (then referred to as L. esculentum) and its closest relatives (which include S. galapagense (then referred to as L. cheesmanii, accession LA0483) and S. pimpinellifolium (then referred to as L. pimpinellifolium) diverged from a common ancestor approximately one million years ago.
Source:Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Two Tomato Species from the Galapagos Islands - Yveline Pailles et al - 2017
Merely being able to freely interbreed might contradict the simplistic notion of species that was taught to me when I was a child at school, but that is not the same as the way the term is used in botany, right? Here’s an example:
Ultimately, all large-scale monographs rely on morphological characters to provide identifications for the many specimens needing determinations, but species concepts may also be influenced by molecular, ecological, and crossing relationships, despite inherent potential conflicts between biological and phylogenetic concepts.
Source: section ‘SPECIES CONCEPTS’ in TAXONOMY OF WILD TOMATOES AND THEIR RELATIVES (SOLANUM SECT. LYCOPERSICOIDES, SECT. JUGLANDIFOLIA, SECT. LYCOPERSICON; SOLANACEAE) Iris E. Peralta - 2008 (sorry for all caps)
I personally find it quite reasonable to categorise a plant that has undergone independent evolution for 1 million years and become a plant that is physically, ecologically, visibly, and genetically significantly different, as a separate species. If I showed my galapagense plants to my neighbours, I don’t think any one of them would ever assume or guess it is a ‘tomato’ - that’s how different it looks, just to give an example. But I am totally fine with someone else having a different method of categorising.
Still, whilst I am fine with it, I find it ironic to consider a plant which has never undergone domestication, to be ‘domestic’. I would find it more logical to lump it together with the self incompatible species and call them all ‘wild’.
For me this is also of practical value. I am interested in galapagense precisely due to the fact that they are not (in my view at least) domestic tomatoes, and the traits that go along with that, including the significant genetic difference it has from domestic tomatoes in terms of increasing the genetic diversity in wild-domestic crosses, as well as the significant differences in disease resistance, pest resistance, and environmental stresses, that it has built up on the path it has taken evolving for it would seem 1 million years along a different path to the other Solanum species such as Solanum lycopersicum, the domestic tomato.
Ah, I just got to reading your comment William. Yes, this is what I was getting at.
Cool. I would love to hear about the edibility of the higher percentage wild ones. For example, are any of those 50% or 5/8 ones reliably delicious? And I’d be really excited if there were 75% wild ones that were delicious, especially if that’s 75% from green wilds!
Ah, I guess this partly answers my question. Though if there’s anything to add, I’d be interested to hear.
Thanks for the explanation of Exserted Orange. I have one growing but thinking of it as having no wild genetics, and no blight resistance, I have refrained from crossing with it so far. Perhaps I should anyway… I’m unsure. I’ve been thinking to focus more on crossing wilds or wild-domestic hybrids to domestics that are already having especially valuable traits for this climate, such as having big fruits but able to grow outside here. One exception is Black Sea Man, which would seem likely to be excellent in many respects all aside from disease resistance. Perhaps I will feel the same about Exserted Orange, though I’m waiting to see how the plant looks. Black Sea Man is so sturdy with a nice thick stem and pretty big fruits, that these traits seem worth trying to cross with to add disease resistance. I wonder how Exserted Orange looks as a plant and how it does in wind etc. … I guess I will make some crosses with it just in case.
Yes, this has been my thinking. hence my qualification “in terms of ancestry” rather than merely talking about percentage as a whole.
I also wonder, it could be interesting to work with some combination of galapagense, cheesmaniae, pimpinellifolium, chmielewskii, peruvianum, and pennelli, and perhaps breed reasonably sized cherry tomatoes that are delicious and yet 100% wild! I could imagine a gal. pen. per. mix turning out quite interesting, for example.
Hmm, on that note, since large seeds are so useful, I have a question. Does one require a lyc. mother in order to get big seeds? Or can a wild x lyc. cross give large seeds in the F2? If it can, then one could keep the wild female line, and potentially breed a large seeded newly domesticated line that could over generations have next to no lyc. genetics, being almost 100% wild in ancestry. And if that stripping back of the lyc. part would mean loosing the lyc. size influence (or almost all of it), I would guess that maybe some degree of size can still come from some of the wild green species. Some of my wild greens have much bigger fruits than any of my pure pimps, for example.
Cool. How do they taste? Do you have any with those percentages that are reliably delicious? Also, this is not a criticism but just something I have found helpful - since there are 17 species of tomato, it could perhaps be misleading to use the term ‘tomato’ to refer only to Solanum lycopersicum. I have found it useful to adopt the convention I have seen used by botanists to refer to each species by the first 3 letters (to save me typing too much!), though admittedly I break this convention when referring to pimpinellifolium as ‘pimp.’ rather than ‘pim.’. For understanding the species, I have found the text ‘TAXONOMY OF WILD TOMATOES AND THEIR RELATIVES (SOLANUM SECT. LYCOPERSICOIDES, SECT. JUGLANDIFOLIA, SECT. LYCOPERSICON; SOLANACEAE) Iris E. Peralta - 2008’ eminently useful.
Someone just posted a photo of an unknown tomato variety with some of the longest styles I’ve yet seen in another thread. I am very convinced that varieties with exposed stigmas get great cross pollination. Though there may be limits! An exserted stigma may not get pollinated if too long! Joseph has touted open anther cones. Which I got with his selections and the sub-population I have been calling “The One!” has them. I found them frustrating to work with last year but seem to have handily made a cross already with these flowers as the emasculated mother this year. Though now have to wait for a tomato to ripen and hopefully not be eaten in the meanwhile.
The 50/50’s were nasty. Just as bad as the wild parent. They were F1s though so no segregation to speak of. Perhaps something will come in the next generation. The 25/75 I didn’t bother tasting. I don’t know whether there are tasty strains of Solanum habrochaites. Mine most certainly isn’t. Just have to be patient I suppose.
Xenia (also known as the Xenia effect) in plants is the effect of pollen on seeds and fruit of the fertilized plant.[1] The effect is separate from the contribution of the pollen towards the next generation.
I’m still not certain. Is this meaning that it is a trait only passed by the males? In which case, crossing any wild species to domestics would result in all F2 seeds being small like wilds?
Ah yeah I’d expect that with F1. But curious if 50% wild or more could lead in a few generations to delicious enough tomatoes that don’t poison us.
Also wish I knew how much wild in Lee Goodwin’s tomatoes! It seems they have enough to give good disease or cold resistance so I’d be interested, like how low we can go in percentage also. I’m guessing the percentage might not he that high.
