Can an Asian elephant successfully mate and produce viable offspring with an African elephant. If so, are the offspring also able to breed successfully?

sibeen said:

Can an Asian elephant successfully mate and produce viable offspring with an African elephant. If so, are the offspring also able to breed successfully?

What did google tell you?

Interesting question. I guess since their distributions overlap in the wild we won’t find any examples, except if they are breed in captivity. But most zoos would never permit such a situation.

Interesting question. I guess since their distributions DON’T overlap in the wild we won’t find any examples, except if they are breed in captivity. But most zoos would never permit such a situation.

fixed

sibeen said:

Can an Asian elephant successfully mate and produce viable offspring with an African elephant. If so, are the offspring also able to breed successfully?

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Yes. No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motty

No, they cannot.

Stinks of being dad homework..

tauto said:

Stinks of being dad homework..

Or he’s just drunk and dreaming of new commercial opportunities.

party_pants said:

tauto said:

Stinks of being dad homework..

Or he’s just drunk and dreaming of new commercial opportunities.

It is Friday night.. The law of averages tells us that most of us should be drunk by now.

roughbarked said:

party_pants said:

tauto said:

Stinks of being dad homework..

Or he’s just drunk and dreaming of new commercial opportunities.

It is Friday night.. The law of averages tells us that most of us should be drunk by now.

What you should really worry about is that the drunker you get, the more sense I make.

sibeen said:

Can an Asian elephant successfully mate and produce viable offspring with an African elephant. If so, are the offspring also able to breed successfully?

I had thought the answer was “no”. But Motty survived a full 12 days before dying.

African and Asian Elephants are an example of convergent evolution. They’re not closely related. IIRC (and I may not, 50% chance) the woolly mammoth is more closely related to the African elephant than the African elephant is to the Indian elephant.

mollwollfumble said:

sibeen said:

Can an Asian elephant successfully mate and produce viable offspring with an African elephant. If so, are the offspring also able to breed successfully?

I had thought the answer was “no”. But Motty survived a full 12 days before dying.

African and Asian Elephants are an example of convergent evolution. They’re not closely related. IIRC (and I may not, 50% chance) the woolly mammoth is more closely related to the African elephant than the African elephant is to the Indian elephant.

I’m not quite right. The African and Asian elephants diverged 5 million years ago. The woolly mammoth and Asian elephants diverged 4 million years ago.

Actually that’s not too bad, compare the separation of lion and tiger 3.9 million years ago.

A few extra facts about elephant evolution.

African elephants and Asian elephants are different genera.
There are at least 161 known extinct elephant species.
There are two extant species of African elephant.
There are three universally-recognised extant Asian elephant subspecies.

Not elephants, but still about evolutionary distance in grazing mammals.

I just came across a startling variation in the number of chromosomes among the relatives of the horse.
The number of chromosome pairs varies from 16 in mountain zebras to 33 in Przewalski’s horse, higher rates of chromosome loss than gain, suggesting the Equus ancestor had between 38 and 42 pairs of chromosomes.

That’s an incredibly large variation in chromosome number. How on Earth did they retain fertility during that evolution of different chromosome numbers?

Do toddlers still call them “hefferlumps” or variations on this?