• early_riser@lemmy.world
    32·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world
    27·
    19 days ago

    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

      • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world
        11·
        19 days ago

        Care to elaborate?

        Interspecies breeding is pretty straightforward. The species have to be very closely related to produce viable offspring.

      • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
        11·
        19 days ago

        “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).

        • residentoflaniakea@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          4·
          18 days ago

          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.

          • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
            3·
            18 days ago

            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.

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        5·
        18 days ago

        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:

        • 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.

        • 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.

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    19 days ago

    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.

      • Enkrod@feddit.org
        20·
        19 days ago

        Those are the results of keeping individuals of both species and opposite sex in the same enclosure. The reproduction part happened all by itself.

          • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
            6·
            18 days ago

            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!

      • HikingVet@lemmy.ca
        9·
        19 days ago

        Not really experiments carried out by humans, more of a didn’t prevent it from happening.

          • HikingVet@lemmy.ca
            15·
            19 days ago

            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.

            • Mok98@feddit.it
              4·
              19 days ago

              This kind of breeding isn’t observed in the wild because of them having different habitats, right? Or are there other reasons?

          • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            8·
            19 days ago

            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.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        6·
        19 days ago

        It answers the question as asked. If you want something else, I think that it’s reasonable to ask you to qualify your question.

      • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
        6·
        18 days ago

        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.

      • residentoflaniakea@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        3·
        18 days ago

        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.

  • InternationalHermit@lemmy.today
    8·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
    6·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
    3·
    18 days ago

    You’d use “individuals” in the second use of creature in this context, but short answer is yes, keeping in mind the definition of species is largely arbitrary.

    There’s much more that goes into the definition than reproductive ability, so for example a lot of birds that are in theory different species are fully capable of breeding with a different bird species.

    Then of course there’s the coywolves and coydogs. Fully fertile (as far as I know), arguably better adapted to the niche than either coyotes or wolves, they’ll probably be recognized as their own species at some point.