Question

Hybrid usually refers to animals or plants resulting from a cross between two races, breeds, strains, or varieties of the same species. Using ONE (1) specific hybrid animal that are actually exist in the world, explain in details how this hybrid animal is formed.

Your explanation should include the parents involved, compare their characteristics to their parents, their respective genetic components, barriers involved to get the hybrid animal and ways to get the hybrid animal.

The details of the summary should be concise and informative. The length of the summary should be less than 500 words.

Answer 1

A mule is the hybrid offspring of a female horse (also known as a mare) and a male donkey (also known as a jack). It has 63 chromosomes from the donkey’s 62 chromosomes and the horse’s 64 chromosomes. Mules can be either male or female and are often sterile. They are sturdy and agile which makes them good beasts of burden.

• Traits From The Horse

· Mules look similar to horses aside from their long ears.

· Their muscle composition is also different.

· The muscles of mules are smoother than those of horses.

· Both mules and horses are strong animals.

· The mule gets its physical abilities from the horse.

· For its size, mules have more endurance and physical strength.

· They have stronger hooves that are suitable to climbing rough terrain.

· Their hooves are also less sensitive to insects.

· They also have thicker and less sensitive skin than horses.

· They don’t need as much food and water as a horse needs.

· They are able to tolerate a number of diseases.

• Traits From The Donkey

· A mule gets its mental sharpness from the donkey.

· Mules, like donkeys, are often perceived as lazy, but that’s just because they are smart enough to have common sense and a natural instinct for self-preservation.

· Once it detects danger, mules tend to avoid it.

· Donkeys and mules are easy to obey humans when they are treated with kindness and patience.

· They are not keen on trusting humans if they are treated harshly and aggressively

The diploid number of chromosomes is 64 for horses, 62 for donkeys, and 63 for mules. It has been widely reported that mules may be a case of an ancestral epigenetic phenomenon called genomic imprinting. The phenomenon of genomic imprinting happens when the expression of a gene may be determined by its origin rather than its DNA sequence.

• A mule gets 32 horse chromosomes from mom and 31 donkey chromosomes from dad for a total of 63 chromosomes. (A horse has 64 chromosomes and a donkey has 62).

• The pattern of chromosomic segregation at meiosis in the case of the mule seems to be fully oriented toward horse chromosomes.

Mules are 99.9% sterile

This is due to an uneven chromosome count although in rare cases, female mules have been known to give birth to foals.

The biological species concept connects the idea of a species to the process of evolution. Because members of a species can interbreed, the species as a whole has a common gene pool, a collection of gene variants.

Postzygotic barriers not only keep species distinct, but also play a role in the formation of new species.