I visited Sea Life Marine Park in Honolulu today and saw the only living “Wolphin” in captivity.
I later learned that a Wolphin is a cross between a False Killer Whale and an Atlantic Bottle-nosed Dolphin. When I was in school, one of the things we were taught was that different species can’t interbreed successfully, and if they do, their offspring is almost always infertile, such as a mule.
In this case these two marine mammals belong to the same family, but come from a different genus. The two species look quite different, have different number of teeth etc., yet they produced an offspring that has already produced it’s own offspring.
I know that lions and tigers can successfully interbreed, but they are in the same genus.
So how is a wolphin even possible? Is this kind of pairing unique, or are there other inter-genus pairings that produce viable breeding offspring?
They lied to you. Many, many species are perfectly or nearly perfectly interfertile. Wolves and coyotes, yaks and cattle and so forth. The propensity for animals of different species to reproduce perfectly is a serious threat to the survival of many species.
Not only that, but mules are not universally sterile. A tiny number are capable of producing offspring.
There’s no reason for it not to be possible. The chromosomes are sufficiently closely aligned to allow successful reproduction and the gametes retain chemical compatibility. That’s all that is required.
Dozens, probably hundreds. There is a thriving industry based upon herds of cattle x bison hybrids. There are any number of gamebird varieties that are intergeneric hybrids, such as the various pheasants hybridised with pheasants or grouse in other genera. There is even a small industry based around flocks of chicken x pheasant hybrids. There is also a thriving industry selling intergeneric hybrids of domestic cats with various wild felids to produce breeds such as Savannas or Bengals. And those are just the intergeneric hybrids that people maintain because they can make money out of them. There are many, many others that appear to be fertile that just aren’t maintained as hybrid populations.
Blake is correct but he didn’t tell you the basic answer. The concept of a species isn’t nearly as clear-cut as they teach you in high school. In fact, it is a made up concept that nature loves to give the finger to anytime it can. However, with a little fudging and wiggle room, it can be made to be mostly true most of the time.
As stated, lots of different species can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. The qualifier that you missed is that it ‘rarely happens in nature’. People can bring lions and tigers together in a pen and produce a liger. However, lions are from Africa and Tigers are from Asia so the qualifier works. Wolves and coyotes can interbreed just fine as well but they have different behavioral and mating patterns even though their ranges interlap so the qualifier also works - usually. The definition of a species isn’t at the same level as the atomic weight of gold obviously and is often up to interpretation.
Lions and tigers are both found in Asia. Until a hundred years or so back lions and tigers commonly encountered one another in the wild.
That’s a really bad example, since the Red Wolf *is *a Wolf x Coyote hybrid that has existed for tens of thousands of years.
While you are right that their are behavioral issues that minimise wolf x coyote hybridisation, it has still been ubiquitous ever since wolves arrived in the Americas. It is most commonly seen in the edge zones of both wolf and coyote ranges, where low population densities make individuals less picky about their mates. Wolf x Coyote hybrids are not uncommon in the natural world and haven’t been since wolves arrived in the New World.
Interestingly the red wolves themselves seem to have become a fairly stable population, and are less inclined to mate with either coyotes or wolves than either of the parent species are to mate with one another.
The simple answer is “maybe”. And there are seldom hard-and-fast lines of “can interbreed”, either: Usually, you’ll have closely-related populations that breed together all the time, and then you’ll have populations a little further apart that interbreed sometimes, but it’s less often due to behavorial differences, or at reduced fertility, and then you’ll have populations that are further apart yet that almost never interbreed, but it can happen occasionally, and so on.
You might also want to read up on “ring species”, which are a real-world phenomenon that’s similar to your fictional example.
In my 100 gallon fish tank a Harlequin Rasbora somehow managed to breed with a Purple Danio . These two fish are as different as can be, and not even in the same genus. Nonetheless, Herman the franken fish is a thriving, active four-year-old fish who shows every sign of looking for a mate. (denied) S/he is at least four times the size of the parents combined, with a steel-grey front half and a coral-orange rear. Not shaped remotely like either parent.
I had added some Clown loaches to the tank, with the plan of allowing the Danio and Rasbora schools to die out as the loaches grew and took up the bio-load. These two were each the last of their schools (neither school had ever bred!)
In our book on the Asian carps, I argue that bighead carp (variously described as genus Hypophthalmichthys or genus Aristichthys) should be in the same genus as silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys) in part because they can produce fertile hybrid offspring. Taxonomy is not an exact science even with our current understanding of genomics.
Does anybody remember Cecil’s column on why a human can’t reproduce with a house cat and he responded with, “For the same reason you can’t park a car in a closet.” Or something like that. It was just a one line response, and one of the funniest.
also, in a later published paper, we note that bighead and silver carps are closer genetically (using mtDNA) than most fish within the same genus in that family.
