Here’s what I learned today:
A donkey is the father of a mule. A mare is the mother of a mule. Mules are sterile.
Well, hee-HAW.
Here’s what I learned today:
A donkey is the father of a mule. A mare is the mother of a mule. Mules are sterile.
Well, hee-HAW.
I think I missed something.
Yup.
I use mules as an example of a sterile hybrid in my biology non-majors class.
One day after talking about them and making the point that they were sterile (the main point being that because of that, horses and donkeys are considered separate species), a girl in the back of the class piped up,
“But if they can’t breed, how do we get more mules?”
um, yeah. I will say, to my credit, that I was one of the few people in the classroom who did NOT laugh at her comment.
Wow. Never knew!
Ricki — Is this right — so, there’s the mare and the donkey and one of them has 62 chromosomes and one has 64 chromosomes. They reproduce a little mule with 63 chromosomes, a number not evenly divisible by 2, which is why they’re sterile.
That’s whut I learnt anyway.
And then you get into the whole mule, donkey, burro conversation that — let’s face it — could go on for days.
Hey – what did you call my father?
aw, man, Tracey, this is for a non-majors class, and I’m a field botanist, not a zoologist. I don’t generally deal with chromosomes in my daily research life. But that sounds right, the number of chromosomes and all.
and the CONCEPT is definitely right.
don’t get me started on chromosomes and chromosome duplication and hybrids or all go all into the development of modern wheat (a chromosome story I DO know) and nobody wants to hear about that….