Jaglion

A jaglion or jaguon is the offspring between a male jaguar and a female lion (lioness). A mounted specimen is on display at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, Hertfordshire, England. It has the lion's background color, brown, jaguar-like rosettes and the powerful build of the jaguar.

On April 9, 2006, two jaglions were born at Bear Creek Wildlife Sanctuary, Barrie (north of Toronto), Ontario, Canada. Jahzara (female) and Tsunami (male) were the result of an unintended mating between a black jaguar called Diablo and a lioness called Lola, which had been hand-raised together and were inseparable. They were kept apart when Lola came into oestrus. Tsunami is spotted, but Jahzara is a melanistic jaglion due to inheriting the jaguar's dominant melanism gene. It was not previously known how the jaguar's dominant melanism gene would interact with lion coloration genes.

When the fertile offspring of a male lion and female jaguar mates with a leopard, the resulting offspring is referred to as a leoliguar.

Rhino Hybrid

A rhinoceros ( "nose horn"), often abbreviated to rhino, is one of any five extant species of odd-toed ungulates in the family Rhinocerotidae, as well as any of the numerous extinct species. Two of these extant species are native to Africa and three to Southern Asia.

There are two subspecies of white rhinoceros: the southern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum simum) and the northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). As of 2013, the southern subspecies has a wild population of 20,405 – making them the most abundant rhino subspecies in the world. However, the northern subspecies is critically endangered, with as few as three known individuals left in captivity. There is no conclusive explanation of the name white rhinoceros. A popular theory that "white" is a distortion of either the Afrikaans word wyd or the Dutch word wijd (or its other possible spellings whyde, weit, etc.,) meaning wide and referring to the rhino's square lips is not supported by linguistic studies.

The white rhino has an immense body and large head, a short neck and broad chest. Females weigh 1,600 kg (4,000 lb) and males 2,400 kg (5,000 lb). The head-and-body length is 3.5–4.6 m (11–15 ft) and the shoulder height is 1.8–2 m (5.9–6.6 ft). On its snout it has two horns. The front horn is larger than the other horn and averages 90 cm (35 in) in length and can reach 150 cm (59 in). The white rhinoceros also has a prominent muscular hump that supports its relatively large head. The colour of this animal can range from yellowish brown to slate grey. Most of its body hair is found on the ear fringes and tail bristles, with the rest distributed rather sparsely over the rest of the body. White rhinos have the distinctive flat broad mouth that is used for grazing.

Tigon

A tigon  or tiglon  is a hybrid cross between a male tiger (Panthera tigris) and a female lion (Panthera leo). Thus, it has parents with the same genus but of different species. The tigon is not currently as common as the converse hybrid, the liger; however, in the late 19th[year needed] and early 20th centuries, Gerald Iles wrote that he had been able to obtain three tigons, but he had never seen a liger.

The tigon's genome includes genetic components of both parents. Tigons can exhibit visible characteristics from both parents:they can have both spots from the mother (lions carry genes for spots—lion cubs are spotted and some adults retain faint markings) and stripes from the father. Any mane that a male tigon may have will appear shorter and less noticeable than a lion's mane and is closer in type to the ruff of a male tiger. It is a common misconception that tigons are smaller than lions or tigers. They do not exceed the size of their parent species because they inherit growth-inhibitory genes from the lioness mother, but they do not exhibit any kind of dwarfism or miniaturization; they often weigh around 180 kilograms (400 lb).

This cross-breeding (between tiger and lioness) can cause difficulties during pregnancy because a tiger is a bigger cat than a lion.

Genetic defects of cubs are not rare. It has been estimated that 1 in 500 000 survives, which shows a very low survival rate.

Guggisberg wrote that ligers and tigons were long thought to be sterile; in 1943, however, a fifteen-year-old hybrid between a lion and an "Island" tiger was successfully mated with a lion at the Munich Hellabrunn Zoo. The female cub, although of delicate health, was raised to adulthood.

At the Alipore Zoo in India, a female tigon named Rudhrani, born in 1971, was successfully mated to an Asiatic lion named Debabrata. The rare, second generation hybrid was called a litigon. Rudhrani produced seven litigons in her lifetime. Some of these reached impressive sizes—a litigon named Cubanacan weighed at least 363 kilograms (800 lb), stood 1.32 metres (4.3 ft) at the shoulder, and was 3.5 metres (11 ft) in total length.

Narluga

The narluga is a very rare hybrid that is created by the inter-breeding of the narwhal, a medium-sized toothed whale, and the beluga whale, an Arctic and sub-Arctic cetacean. Narlugas occur very rarely but over the recent years, there has been an interesting increase in sightings of these bizarre creatures in the Northern Atlantic.

Coywolf

Coywolf (sometimes called woyote) is an informal term for a canid hybrid descended from coyotes and gray wolves. Hybridization between the two species is facilitated by the fact that they diverged relatively recently (around 6,000–117,000 years ago). Genomic studies indicate that nearly all North American gray wolf populations possess some degree of admixture with coyotes following a geographic cline, with the lowest levels occurring in Alaska, but the highest in Ontario and Quebec as well as Atlantic Canada

Hybrids of any combination tend to be larger than coyotes, and show behaviors intermediate between coyotes and the other parent's species.In one captive hybrid experiment, six F1 hybrid pups from a male northwestern gray wolf and a female coyote were measured shortly after birth with an average on their weights, total lengths, head lengths, body lengths, hind foot lengths, shoulder circumferences, and head circumferences compared with those on pure coyote pups at birth. The results found that, despite being delivered by a female coyote, the hybrid pups at birth were much larger and heavier than regular coyote pups born and measured around the same time.[2] At six months of age, these hybrids were closely monitored at the Wildlife Science Center. Executive Director Peggy Callahan at the facility states that the howls of these hybrids are said to start off much like regular gray wolves with a deep strong vocalization, but changes partway into a coyote-like high pitched yipping.

Compared with pure coyotes, Eastern wolf-coyote hybrids have been recorded forming more cooperative social groups and are generally less aggressive with each other while playing.Hybrids also reach sexual maturity when they are two years old, which is much later than occurs in pure coyotes.

Hinny

A hinny is a domestic equine hybrid that is the offspring of a male horse, a stallion, and a female donkey, a jenny. It is the reciprocal cross to the more common mule, which is the product of a male donkey and a female horse, a mare.

Hinnies on average are slightly smaller than mules in part because donkeys are generally smaller than horses, and growth potential of equine offspring is influenced by the size of the dam's womb. There is debate over whether this is the only reason for the size variances between the two types of hybrid equines.[citation needed] Some fanciers[who?] believe this size difference is only physiological, owing to the smaller size of the donkey dam,[citation needed] as compared to mares, which are generally much larger. Others claim it is a natural consequence of the reciprocal cross.[citation needed] The position of the American Donkey and Mule Society (ADMS) is: "The genetic inheritance of the hinny is exactly the same as the mule."

Like mules, hinnies do come in many sizes. This is because donkeys come in many sizes, from miniatures, as small as 24 inches (61 cm; 6 hands) at the withers, to American Mammoth Jacks that may be over 15 hands (60 inches, 152 cm) at the withers. Thus, a hinny is restricted to being about the size of the largest breed of donkey. Mules, however, have a female horse as a parent, so they can be as large as the size of the largest breed of horse, such as those foaled from work horse mares such as the Belgian.

Killer Bee

The Africanized bee, also known as the Africanised honey bee and known colloquially as "killer bee", is a hybrid of the Western honey bee species (Apis mellifera), produced originally by cross-breeding of the African honey bee (A. m. scutellata), with various European honey bees such as the Italian bee A. m. ligustica and the Iberian bee A. m. iberiensis.

The Africanized honey bee was first introduced to Brazil in the 1950s, in an effort to increase honey production; but, in 1957, 26 swarms accidentally escaped quarantine. Since then, the species has spread throughout South America, and arrived in North America in 1985. Hives were found in south Texas of the United States in 1990.

Africanized bees are more aggressive, and react to disturbances faster than European honey bees. They can chase a person a quarter of a mile (400 m); they have killed some 1,000 humans, with victims receiving ten times more stings than from European honey bees. They have also killed horses and other animals.