Moved to Biology.
Sex and Animals
- Thread starter Orleander
- Start date
Thank God. I was refusing to open this thread until I noticed Plazma Inferno!'s nic: I, uh, thought this thread was all about geeks and bestiality. Orleander: you should really pick better titles. Like, that Cheating thread should have been named "There's An Annoying Ant Up My Pants".
For the most part it is not so much about cytological (that is the sperm cell) that poses a problem but rather the genetic material. You cannot simply mix chromosomes from different species and hope that it works out. In fact even within a species genetic incompatibility exists.
Additional factors are that sperms might have reduced or no viability in the wrong species, are not able to chemotaxically find the ovarium or simply are not able to fuse.
I do not know how large the differences between species actually are. I suppose they are quite significant, though.
river-wind
Valued Senior Member
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Our closest relative is the "true" chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes. The bonobo, Pan paniscus is a member of the same genus so they are closer to the other chimp than we are, but they are not as close to us as the other chimp is. Chimps cannot crossbreed with humans, but IIRC they can with bonobos. There is no species of ape that we are capable of hybridizing with. Sorry, you'll have to cross that one off your list of experiments.
As an earlier post pointed out, the definition of "genus" used to be a group of species that were capable of hybridizing. So if you could get two related species to mate, or just use AI, you could depend on a good chance of getting a viable hybrid offspring. Now they've redefined genera using criteria that I've never been able to get anybody to explain to me. As a result we've got cross-genus hybridization. Cats and ocelots are no longer in the same genus, but ocicats are so common you can buy them for pets.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
In captivity, it is far easier with birds. Baby birds do this thing called "imprinting." When their eyes open at about one week, whoever is feeding them, that's what they assume their species is. That's how we hand-raise baby parrots to make them automatically tame, and you can do it with any baby bird if you've got one. You can leverage this instinct to raise babies of different species together so they consider each other members of the same flock. With some of the more gregarious psittacines you can even introduce hand-fed birds to each other as adolescents and they'll be sanguine about it. So when they reach breeding age--about seven years with the larger psittacines, one year for parakeets and songbirds--they will regard everyone as a potential mate.
Yes I know I said that the courtship ritual is important with birds, but the more intelligent species have a bit of something we have in abundance: the ability to override their instincts.
There is in fact a massive amount of hybridization going on with macaws, cockatoos, Amazons, grassland parakeets, and other genera of parrots. The first Catalina Macaw, a hybrid of a blue-and-gold with a scarlet, was hatched on Catalina Island (off L.A.) about 80 years ago. Since then just about every possible pairing of macaw species has been successfully tried, and they're into the third and fourth generation. The Camelot Macaw, vermilion in color, is the second generation offspring of a Catalina with a scarlet--1/4 blue-and-gold, 3/4 scarlet. The Lavender Macaw, which is just what the name says, is 1/8 blue-and-gold, 7/8 scarlet.
The Reds--oops I mean the Greens, I keep forgetting they changed color like hybrid birds--are up in arms about this and want laws passed against hybridization. They are worried that one of these crossbreeds will get loose, fly several thousand miles back to its ancestral habitat, start dating the locals, and contaminate the gene pool.
Yeah sure. As the rain forest keeps disappearing. There are already several psittacine species of which we can say there are more breeding pairs in commercial aviaries in the United States than there are in the wild. Some of these hybrid birds that took twenty years to develop have $20,000 price tags, they won't be getting lost anyway. And if they do they'll join the local flocks in the palm trees of L.A., San Diego, Miami, and America's other subtropical locales.