I know that lions and tigers can interbreed and produce ligers and tiglons. Are cheetahs capable of interbreeding with the other big cats, or are they too genetically distinct to do so?
Cheetahs aren’t actually “big cats”. I put that in quotes because it’s not a scientific term. But cheetahs are not as closely related as the real “big” cats are to each other. Cheetahs are more like “inbetween cats”.
I’m not aware of any verified cheetah hybrids out there.
Cheetahs have enought trouble breeding amongst themselves.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-breed.html
Actually, I don’t think they’re related to the “small cats”, either. As in, a housecat and a lion are closer to each other than either is to a cheetah.
One telltale marker is retractable claws. All the true cats have them, but cheetahs don’t.
Wikipedia on the Felidae may be informative.
Of the “big cats,” the lion, tiger, jaguar, and leopard are in genus Panthera. Some experts also put the snow leopard there; Wikipedia, following a “splitter” paradigm, puts it in Uncia. The clouded leopards are in Neofelis. These two or three genera are closely related.
Older analyses (from when I learned felid taxonomy) set the cheetah apart from all other cats great and small in its own subfamily, Acinonychinae. The taxonomy that Wikipedia follows (based on DNA analysis) shows it as the separate genus Acinonyx which is closely related to Puma, comprising the mountain lion and the jaguaroundi.
I don’t think anyone knows. Cheetahs are a threatened species, and zoos breeding them are probably more interested in making more cheetahs. The closest living relative of the cheetah is the puma, and pumas can interbreed with leopards…
So… once a cheetah, always a cheetah.
Sorry, tried to resist, failed.
There isn’t really anything ‘inbetween’ about cheetahs:
Defining Cheetahs, a multivariate analysis of skull shape in big cats (pdf doc)
Further, since they are presumed to share a common ancestor with pumas, about the only thing they could be “between” is other cats.
Sure there is. They are big in size, but they don’t roar. Again, “big cat” is not a scientific term, as I’m sure you know. So, there are different ways to define “big cat”, and one of the definition is the cats that roar. And if you take that as your definition, then can’t call a cheetah a “big cat”, but you don’t really want to call a cheetah a “small cat”, so intermediate does the job well, in a completely nonscientific way, of course.
Sorry, I actually misunderstood your ‘inbetween’ to mean that cheetahs were between cats and…something else. My response was that they are between ‘some cats’ and ‘other cats’, and are, therefore, full-on cats. Didn’t even occur to me that you were talking about size… Apologies for the misunderstanding.
Do cheetahs purr?
~VOW
Then it’s true that cheetahs never prosper…
No worries. The whole thing about “big cats” is kind of a distraction anyway since it’s not a scientific designation. But, yes, cheetahs are cats in every sense of the word.
I recall hearing at MArine World (I think) that apparently some long time in the past, Cheetahs were almost extinct, but have bred back to where they are today via some rather vicious inbreeding. However, rather than the usual issues that comes with that, instead Cheetah’s have become almost clones of each other, to the point where tissue grafts from cheetah to cheetah usually do not require immunosuppressants.
Anecdotal, obviously.
Thanks for the information, guys!
Yes, that’s pretty much the case. They recently went through what geneticists call a genetic bottleneck. Something we probably went through sometime around 60k - 80k years ago. Ours probably wasn’t quite so bad, but it still happened.
Tangentially and temporally related XKCD.
Anecdotedly, in Africa many families keep Cheetahs as housecats.
How “many”? There aren’t very many cheetahs in existence.