Lions, panthers, leopards, pumas, tigers
Plenty.
Mules are the result of donkeys and horses mating.
Ligers are the result of lions and tigers mating.
It’s literally what the word “hybrid” originally meant: the offspring of two different species.
Horse (equus ferus caballus) + donkey (equus asinus) = mule
In general, the most widely cited definition of what a species even is is a group who’s members can produce fertile offspring. But there are still edge cases like ring species, where population A can mate with population B, population B can mate with population C, but A and C can’t.
If you’ll permit me one of my linguistics tangents, there’s an analogous phenomenon called a dialect continuum, where dialect A is intelligible to speakers of dialect B, dialect B is intelligible to speakers of dialect C, but A and C are not mutually intelligible.
There’s lions and tigers too. Same deal with offspring being sterile
Whose
Nah, it’s definitely ‘Horse’
Ligers (products of male lions and female tigers), and tigons (product of female lions and male tigers).
Male ligers are sterile, but female ones can reproduce. Same with tigons.
Those are results of what I think are disgusting, unnatural experiments.
I think you’re getting downvoted because you sound like a troll, but perhaps you just don’t understand something that most of us learn in primary school. Did you grow up homeschooled or in a country without basic education?
If you’re not trolling, this isn’t your fault and people shouldn’t be downvoting you for asking questions.
So long as you’re willing to learn, ignore the downvotes. You need to understand that your views on this are misinformed, though, and they sound based in religious fundamentalism.
Some of y’all over here use the word troll too liberally
I didn’t call you one. I was just saying that your comments may be taken that way.
Are you serious about your question? In that case I’m sorry you’re getting downvoted. That’s all.
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Oh great, it’s gonna be one of these posts
Those are the results of keeping individuals of both species and opposite sex in the same enclosure. The reproduction part happened all by itself.
tbf, teaching a lion how a condom works is quite tedious
Lion: What’s a banana, and why do I care?
Teacher: It’s this thing prey sometimes eats and….
Lion: Mmm. Prey.
Teacher: Aargh! No! Grglgl!
And most probably extremely dangerous.
If the unnatural part refers to keeping them in the same area/habitat, and I’m not sure the animals in question would agree with it being disgusting as animals do what animals do.
Not really experiments carried out by humans, more of a didn’t prevent it from happening.
But lions and tigers don’t breed naturally, do they?
Well, no one has tried to breed them so, the hybrids thatbwe have are from lions and tigers that did it of theor own accord. If you are having problems with the logic, seek out a veterinarian. They can explain how it happens at your level.
This kind of breeding isn’t observed in the wild because of them having different habitats, right? Or are there other reasons?
Pretty much the different habitat thing as far as I know.
They don’t share territory currently, so no. Even before they barely shared territory, looking at some maps there is only slight overlap with the most eastern lions and most western tigers. Not sure if they shared that small overlap at the same time either.
It answers the question as asked. If you want something else, I think that it’s reasonable to ask you to qualify your question.
Humans did. There was regular crossbreeding producing hybrids between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
Other species can produce hybrids, but i dont know of any that do so regularly
Not like that. I mean of completely different kind.
“Kind” is a meaningless word here.
Humans (Sapiens) were a different species of Homo than Neanderthals (Neanderthalensis); both are in the genus Homo.
Thus: Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis.This is exactly like lions (Leo) and tigers (Tigris) being different species, but in the same genus (Panthera).
Thus: Panthera Leo and Panthera Tigris.And just like with lions and tigers, offspring are often either infertile or only fertile in one direction – IIRC, human/neanderthal couplings only produced fertile offspring if the human was female and the neanderthal male (we can see this in our own DNA).
Just to point out kind is frequently used by proponents of devine/intelligent design pseudoscience to muddy the waters in arguing established biology because terms like species or clade etc refutes their biblical arguments. Not saying that this is what the poster belongs to, it could just be a knowledge gap.
Yes exactly, thanks.
And something many of them can’t understand is that ‘species’ is a very fluid thing. There are no clear boundaries, and it’s just a term we use to wrap our heads round things.
Like with chickens and eggs, there was never a single point where an avian dinosaur gave birth to a bird – it’s not a clear delineation. Something mostly an avian theropod gave birth to something slightly more bird, and this happened over and over, with the slightly more accumulating for millions of years, and you finally get ‘bird’. But there’s no way to point at one generation and say ‘see, it’s now a bird’.
The process is so gradual, you could never point at a thing and say This Is Where Speciation Happened. It doesn’t work that way. Just like you can’t point to a drop of water in the ocean and say This Is Where The Wave Started.
Care to elaborate?
Interspecies breeding is pretty straightforward. The species have to be very closely related to produce viable offspring.
I’m not aware of any such example. I’m not an expert, so could be wrong and the terminology in the following could wrong, but just to give you an idea:
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If the species are genetically too different, it can already be a problem that the reproduction organs don’t match. For example, human sperm can’t even try to inseminate a chicken egg, because the egg shell simply blocks it.
This is a fairly obvious example, but even at microscopic scale, the sperm may not be compatible with the egg cell. -
Then you’ve got the problem that the DNA needs to be combined in some fashion. If you’ve got a different number of chromosomes, that will cause problems.
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But even if a successful insemination were to take place and a fetus develops, there’s a very high chance that the gene combination of e.g. a human and a chicken just does not develop into something that can survive. It might have a chicken heart in a human-sized body and just can’t pump enough blood to survive. All kinds of things like that can go wrong.
In general, nature is messy. It does not care about our definition of a species. But yeah, the chance of inter-species offspring is just very low when the species are very different.
While this doesn’t change the viability of humans fertilizing chickens, chicken sperms doesn’t have some special ability to penetrate the egg shell, the shell is formed well after the egg is fertilized.
Ah, that does make a lot of sense, yeah. Thanks!
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Define kind.
Kind of if the species are very close. The most famous example is probably mule:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
What a species is and how genes flow between populations is complex and weird!
Simply put, no.
The nearest you can get to the notion you are trying to explore are crossbreeds between horses and donkeys, dogs and wolves, and captivity involuntary crossbreeding of large cats.
These crossbreedings are only possible because the animals involved share a common ancestor that is still close enough in the evolutionary history to allow the mating, fertilization and subsequent successful carrying of offspring.
Dogs and wolves are so close as species their offspring is completely viable. Dogs (canis familiaris) are technically a sub species of wolves (canis lupus).
Some crossbreeds of big cats are infertile and some are genetically viable. The mating and crossbreeding is possible because all cats are in the same family (felidae), hence, still very close but already far enough between species that offspring may or may not be viable (capable of reproducing afterwards).
Donkeys and horses are already far apart enough that any offspring is completely inviable.
So, by this same logic, the more far apart two species are from their common ancestors, the more difficult it becomes to achieve successful crossbreeding or crossbreeding at all.
A cat and a dog can not crossbreed. A bear and a dog can not crossbreed. Humans and apes can not crossbreed.
No animal, no life form, can successfully reproduce with another if they are not of the same species or do not share very, very close ancestry.
So humans and chimps are genetically further apart than horses and donkeys, wolves and dogs?
Yes.
The common ancestor from which all great apes - chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and humans - derived and evolved is so far away in evolutionary history that crossbreeding simply became impossible.
Logic and empiric evidence from other animals, today, suggests there was a period of time where these diverging species could still intermingle and crossbreed. At least in theory. It would be quite hard to take such events as granted and even more to prove it.
What can be asserted is that through a time scale that is incredibly hard to conceptualize for most - millions of years - from a common ancestor several new species evolved, adapting to their environment and changing in response to it, to the point the “cousins” can no longer recognize each other as such.
Yep. Dogs; are because of us ~40,000 years ago, technically a subspecies of wolf. I know horses started in North America, and donkeys in Africa…
That’s sort of impossible by definition.
One of the ways we have defined a species is that it can’t breed with another species, be it due to bio mechanics (the sex organs don’t match), or genetics (mismatched chromosomes etc). Humans have tried to create hybrids of closely related species like horses and donkeys, but the resulting mule is sterile. See also tiger lion hybrids etc.
But even that definition kind of breaks down in some cases:
If it happens, they were already closely related on the species branch, and usually there are issues with their DNA and ability to reproduce themselves because of the slight differences.
Viruses, in a sense.
Donkeys.
