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A mule is a sterile hybrid of a male donkey and a female horse.Mules are smaller than horses but stronger than donkeys, making them useful as pack animals.. In biology, a hybrid is the offspring resulting from combining the qualities of two organisms of different varieties, subspecies, species or genera through sexual reproduction.
The sterility of many interspecific hybrids in angiosperms has been widely recognised and studied. [33] Interspecific sterility of hybrids in plants has multiple possible causes. These may be genetic, related to the genomes, or the interaction between nuclear and cytoplasmic factors, as will be discussed in the corresponding section.
Hybrid incompatibility occurs when the offspring of two closely related species are not viable or suffer from infertility. Charles Darwin posited that hybrid incompatibility is not a product of natural selection, stating that the phenomenon is an outcome of the hybridizing species diverging, rather than something that is directly acted upon by selective pressures. [4]
When two populations diverge from each other and encounter new - and different - environments they may adapt to these environments. These adaptations can result in hybrid sterility as a side effect. The genes that have arisen to adapt to different ecological surroundings can thus cause hybrid incompatibilities.
In humans, barring intersex conditions causing aneuploidy and other unusual states, it is the male that is heterogametic, with XY sex chromosomes.. Haldane's rule is an observation about the early stage of speciation, formulated in 1922 by the British evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane, that states that if — in a species hybrid — only one sex is inviable or sterile, that sex is more ...
If hybrid offspring are either sterile or less-fit than non-hybrid offspring, mating between members of two different species will be selected against. Natural selection decreases the probability of such hybridization by selecting for the ability to identify mates of one's own species from those of another species.
Empirical evidence supports a role for heteromorphic sex chromosomes in hybrid sterility and inviability. A closely related observation is the large X effect stating that there is a disproportionate contribution of the X/Z-chromosome in fitness reduction of heterogametic hybrids. [22]
A hybrid zone may appear during secondary contact, meaning there would be an area where the two populations cohabitate and produce hybrids, often arranged in a cline. The width of the zone may vary from tens of meters to several hundred kilometers. A hybrid zone may be stable, or it may not.