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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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I know there are multigenational ligers. Just keep breeding the mixed females with pure tigers or lions. I don't know if someone is trying to make a stable fully fertile hybrid population.

I was thinking about including ligers/tigons, but I already had multiple examples so I de-prioritized ligers/tigons, and ended up not getting around to them for the reason you mentioned: males have been established to be sterile with a fair degree of certainty.

I went with the grizzly/polar bear example, since at least two female hybrids have been shown to be fertile (in the wild, no less!), it's merely unknown if male hybrids are fertile or not, and brown bears are partially descended from polar bears.

It also made me chuckle that you mentioned ligers but not tigons. Ligers (lion father, tiger mother [not that kind of tiger mother]) are more famous than tigons (lion mother, tiger father), likely due to the large body size of ligers (larger than both lions and tigers, whereas tigons aren't any larger [and may be smaller] than lions and tigers).

Life must be rough for male tigons. Small, infertile, and forgotten, while female tigons, ligers, lions, and tigers put in their Panthera dating profiles: "Don't bother if you're under 10' or 1,000 lbs."

However, it's noteworthy that lions and tigers are able to produce fertile female offspring as it is. They diverged about 4 million years ago. Lions are actually more closely related to leopard and jaguars than they are to tigers and snow leopards; tigers are more closely related to snow leopards than they are to lions + leopards + jaguars. Humans and chimpanzees split about 5.5 million years ago.