• Question: have you ever experienced a animal thats part one and part another in the genes given from pearents. dog/cat maybe.....

    Asked by halla024 to Claire, Joanna, Kapila, Renata, Suzanne on 24 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Suzanne Harvey

      Suzanne Harvey answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      There is a liger, which is a cross between a lion and a tiger. They can only breed in captivity though, as lions and tigers would never be in contact with each other in the wild, so it’s a man made thing…

    • Photo: Joanna Bryson

      Joanna Bryson answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Yes, people breed things together, like horses & donkeys to make a mule, but you can’t do it if they aren’t very much like each other to start out — it won’t work. I saw a talk a couple years ago where the speaker said this happened much more than we realised in nature & it might be an important way for nature to keep being new and deal with change. But I don’t know much about that.

      When two different species have babies or seeds together, we call that a hybrid. Here’s a Wikipedia page about them, which has a few pictures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_%28biology%29

    • Photo: Renata Medeiros

      Renata Medeiros answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      I haven’t worked with any hybrid animals so far but the project I’m preparing at the moment is precisely about that!
      In Round Island, a small island off Mauritius, at least three different species of seabird have been found to start mixing together producing hybrids that are also capable of breeding (many hybrid species are not capable of producing babies and that’s one of the reasons we don’t find them very often in the wild). I am very excited to study these birds because situations like this give us great ideas on how the evolution of species works. As Joanna pointed, species can only mix if they aren’t too different, so these birds don’t look as impressive as a mixture between a cat and a dog would look like but it is still fascinating to investigate it!

    • Photo: Claire El Mouden

      Claire El Mouden answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      Nope. I once saw a liger in a zoo though.

      Very different species (like dog/cat) would be unable to create a living baby. Only closely related ones are able to.

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