Weird Squash Phenotypes

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Last year, I planted a short row of mixta squash with long rows of moschata squash on either side of it. I was hoping for some naturally occurring inter-species hybridization. It's looking like that was successful. The seeds for this plant came out of a mixta squash. It has traits that look like they came from a moschata squash.

Moschata-like peduncle. Mixta-like skin coloration. Fruit shape mid-way between mixta and moschata.


Leaf traits about mid-way between mixta and moschata.


There are also some F2 plants, (and I suppose some BC1 plants in each direction.) The leaves on one of the patches are waist high on me. Wow!!! That is some vigorously growing squash. Definitely out-competing the weeds!!! Some of the flowers are huge.

Mixta/Moschata interspecies hybrid. Flower traits about mid-way between the species.

Mixta	Moschata

[Joseph Lofthouse]

This plant showed up in the moschata squash patch... It is unlike any moschata that I have ever grown before. Last year, there was a hill of Cucurbita palmata growing in the Moschata squash patch. It flowered, but did not set fruit. Altogether, I grew 9 species of cucurbits in that field last year.

Never seen this shape or size of leaf on a moschata squash before. The plants on either side are typical of moschata squash.


Closeup of leaves:


The fruit looks like this. Peduncle looks like a moschata. Fruit looks miniaturized to match a miniature plant.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

This spring I planted a patch of moschata squash who's mothers were fig-leaved. Pollen donors were mostly regular-leaved. There are plenty of fig-leaved plants showing up this year, and I have been culling some that aren't. Not doing careful culling, because in some cases, the trait is showing up late, but I'm culling enough to move the population more towards fig-leaves.

Fig-leaved moschata:

[steev]

I'll be interested to hear your opinion of the food-qualities of that first MixtaXMoschata squash; noting that even if it's a spitter, later generations may be valuable.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Found a fig-leaved mixta squash... It's not fruiting yet, but I bet when it does, that it looks like an interspecies hybrid with the fig-leaved moschata. Things are sure getting messy in my squash patch!!! Is it even proper to call this a mixta squash? Couldn't it just as easily be called a moschata? Is it even legitimate to call mixta and moschata separate species?

Fig-leaved mixta squash.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Aug 16, 2016 9:29:27 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

Found a fig-leaved mixta squash... It's not fruiting yet, but I bet when it does, that it looks like an interspecies hybrid with the fig-leaved moschata. Things are sure getting messy in my squash patch!!! Is it even proper to call this a mixta squash? Couldn't it just as easily be called a moschata? Is it even legitimate to call mixta and moschata separate species?

Fig-leaved mixta squash.

haha. That's an interesting question Joseph. From a biology textbook perspective anything that easily crosses is the same species. A persons definition of "easily" is up for debate though. In your case i'd throw in my two cents and say that the main hurdle between the two is mostly growing season lengths with only a slight genetic hurdle barely worth mentioning as the two seem diverging but not quite separated yet. So once you make more and more of these crosses it would probably be appropriate to merge them into one clan or the other, and in your case the mixtas will be absorbed into the moshata clan.

In the case of Corn (Maize) and Teosinte they both easily cross with each other generally, with one direction of crosses probably working better than the other. But are they the same species? They have vastly different fruit structures despite the overall sameness. Hard to say, i'd probably go with the definition that they are the same overall species and only differing in subspecies ever so slightly.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Aug 16, 2016 11:07:40 GMT -5 keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) said:

So once you make more and more of these crosses it would probably be appropriate to merge them into one clan or the other, and in your case the mixtas will be absorbed into the moshata clan.

Once I make more and more of these crosses, the Pepos an Maximas will be included in the family as well!!! In any case, I've always been more of a lumper than a splitter.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Aug 14, 2016 22:51:31 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

This plant showed up in the moschata squash patch... It is unlike any moschata that I have ever grown before. Last year, there was a hill of Cucurbita palmata growing in the Moschata squash patch. It flowered, but did not set fruit. Altogether, I grew 9 species of cucurbits in that field last year.

Never seen this shape or size of leaf on a moschata squash before. The plants on either size are typical of moschata squash.


Closeup of leaves:


The fruit looks like this. Peduncle looks like a moschata. Fruit looks miniaturized to match a miniature plant.

wow! That really is an odd looking squash plant... I'm very interested in seeing what traits this one has in the future as well as offspring. Do you really think it's a cross with Cucurbita palmata?!? In any case it looks very odd and very interesting. Keep us informed. This thread is always interesting to me.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

The flower looks more like C. palmata than C. moschata. (C. pepo, and C mixta have pointy flowers as well.) The flower is not at all typical of moschata.


The leaf has white along the veins similar to C. palmata and some C. moschata. Leaf shape is not typical of C. moschata. C. palmata has 5 pointed (star-like) leaves...

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I attempted some manual inter-species squash hybrids today. The pollen donors were F2 plants from the mixta/moschata crosses. A female that I sealed last night before it opened was Lady Godiva, a hull-less seeded pepo. Another female that I didn't get sealed up last night was a maxima buttercup. If I get a chance to do this cross right, then I might try again, otherwise, this attempt will have to do. It aughta be easy enough to identify any hybrids.

It's easy to misplace squash between last night and this morning, so stakes and flags would have been useful...

[steev]

Always good to record/annotate in the field; I find I have very unreliable recall of what I did last month, if not yesterday.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Here's a couple photos for your viewing enjoyment.

This plant came out of a fruit last year that looked like an interspecies hybrid between mixta and moschata squash. Ain't that the most classic looking moschata necked squash ever? Woo hoo!. So I'm speculating that the seed that produced this plant is ([mixta X moschata] X moschata).


Here's another squash from the same mother... I took this photo to document the orange coloration inside, which showed up when I scratched a label onto the squash. I'm excited about orange fleshed squash, cause it seems to me like they taste better.

[walt]

Early in this thread, Carol said that intercrossing two or a few squash varieties will give better results than intercrossing several varieties. Sounds right.
But for some time, I've been thinking about starting a breeding population by crossing several varieties with Butternut, then backcrossing the F1s to Butternut.
My reasoning has been, Butternut is my favorite squash. But as an inbred variety, it is stagnant. Furth selection will do little good. Outcrossing to other very good squash should give variation for selection, while still being 3/4 Butternut, the population should be mostly good, well-adapted squash.
Comments?

[walt]

I didn't mention that one reason for starting with crosses with several varieties is that based on the F!s, some of the F1s would be discarded.

[andyb]

Backcrossing seems like a reasonable strategy. If you want to reduce the variability even more, you could do two backcrosses and get it down to 1/8 non-Butternut. You could even decide whether or not to do the second backcross after you saw the results of the first backcross.