Hybrid animals that are hard to believe actually
exist.
The Liger
Meet the worlds largest cat.
Ligers are the world’s biggest cats, larger than
their parents, with the strength of a lion and speed of a tiger combined.
An average male liger stands almost 12ft tall on
its hind legs and weighs up to half a ton, twice the weight of a wild lion or
tiger.
How did the Liger appear ?
If the father is a lion and the mother a tiger, the
offspring are known as ligers and the pairing results in gigantism.
So popular did they become that zoos in Europe
clamored for specimens and so stray dogs on that Continent also came to be
frightened away by massive mounds of manure. Ligers look like both their
parents only bigger. Their teeth are whoppers: two inches long.
They may resemble either parent, and range from
white to gold to brown, with or without spots and stripes. A male liger may
have a mane, but it is usually much smaller than his father’s.
As hybrids, ligers have low fertility rates, but
some females have produced an offspring by mating with full lions or tigers.
Liger males are totally unfertile though.
On a typical day, a liger will devour 9 kg of meat,
usually beef or chicken, and is capable of eating 45 kg at a single sitting.
When he is fully grown he is expected to reach 3.5m, and more than 300 kg.
Tigon
Strangely, if the pairing is reversed and the mother is a lion, the offspring – known as a tigon – will be small, weighing less than 150 kg.
Ligers and tigons are not thought to appear in the
wild, as the behavior and habitats of lions and tigers make interbreeding
unlikely.
In the Thirties in South Africa, the two species
were put in the same cage and, to the keepers surprise, they didn’t fight. In
fact, they made love, and the liger was born.
A Tigon and their cubs example
Tigon
Cubs
Liger Cubs
History
The history of lion-tiger hybrids dates to at least
the early 19th century in India. In 1798, Étienne Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire(1772–1844) made a colour plate of the offspring of a lion and a
tiger. The portmanteau "liger" was coined by the 1930s.In 1825, G. B.
Whittaker made an engraving of liger cubs born in 1824. The parents and their
three liger offspring are also depicted with their trainer in a 19th-century
painting in the naïve style.
Two liger cubs born in 1837 were exhibited to King
William IV and to his successor Queen Victoria. On 14 December 1900 and on 31
May 1901, Carl Hagenbeck wrote to zoologist James Cossar Ewart with details and
photographs of ligers born at the Hagenbeck's Tierpark in Hamburg in 1897.
In Animal Life and the World of Nature (1902–1903),
A.H. Bryden described Hagenbeck's "lion-tiger" hybrids:
It has remained for one of the most enterprising
collectors and naturalists of our time, Mr. Carl Hagenbeck, not only to breed
but to bring successfully to a healthy maturity, specimens of this rare
alliance between those two great and formidable Felidae, the lion and tiger.
The illustrations will indicate sufficiently how fortunate Mr. Hagenbeck has
been in his efforts to produce these hybrids. The oldest and biggest of the
animals shown is a hybrid born on the 11th May 1897. This fine beast, now more
than five years old, equals and even excels in his proportions a well-grown lion,
measuring as he does from nose tip to tail 10 ft 2 inches in length, and
standing only three inches less than 4 ft at the shoulder. A good big lion will
weigh about 400 lb the hybrid in question, weighing as it does no less than 467
lb, is certainly the superior of the most well-grown lions, whether wild-bred
or born in a menagerie. This animal shows faint striping and mottling, and, in
its characteristics, exhibits strong traces of both its parents. It has a
somewhat lion-like head, and the tail is more like that of a lion than of a
tiger. On the other hand, it has no trace of mane. It is a huge and very
powerful beast.
In 1935, four ligers from two litters were reared
in the Zoological Gardens of Bloemfontein, South Africa. Three of them, a male
and two females, were still living in 1953. The male weighed 340 kg (750 lb)
and stood a foot and a half (45 cm) taller than a full grown male lion at the
shoulder.
Although ligers are more commonly found than tigons
today, in At Home In The Zoo (1961), Gerald Iles wrote "For the record I
must say that I have never seen a liger, a hybrid obtained by crossing a lion
with a tigress. They seem to be even rarer than tigons.
Size and growth
The liger is often believed to represent the
largest known cat in the world. Males reach a total length of 3 to 3.6 m,
meaning they are larger than large Siberian tiger males. Imprinted genes may be
a factor contributing to huge liger size. These are genes that may or may not be
expressed on the parent they are inherited from, and that occasionally play a
role in issues of hybrid growth. For example, in some dog breed crosses, genes
that are expressed only when maternally-inherited cause the young to grow larger
than is typical for either parent breed. This growth is not seen in the
paternal breeds, as such genes are normally "counteracted" by genes
inherited from the female of the appropriate breed.
Other big cat hybrids can reach similar sizes; the
litigon, a rare hybrid of a male lion and a female tigon, is roughly the same
size as the liger, with a male named Cubanacan (at the Alipore Zoo in India)
reaching 363 kg (800 lb). The extreme rarity of these second-generation hybrids
may make it difficult to ascertain whether they are larger or smaller, on
average than the liger.
It is wrongly believed that ligers continue to grow
throughout their lives due to hormonal issues. It may be that they simply grow
far more during their growing years and take longer to reach their full adult
size. Further growth in shoulder height and body length is not seen in ligers
over 6 years old, same as both lions and tigers. Male ligers also have the same
levels of testosterone on average as an adult male lion, yet are azoospermic in
accordance with Haldane's rule. In addition, female ligers may also attain
great size, weighing approximately 320 kg (705 lb) and reaching 3.05 m (10 ft)
long on average, and are often fertile. In contrast, pumapards (hybrids between
pumas and leopards) tend to exhibit dwarfism.
Ligers are about the same size as the prehistoric
Smilodon populator and American lion. Jungle Island, an interactive animal
theme park in Miami, is home to a liger named Hercules, the largest non-obese
liger, who is recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest
living cat on Earth, weighing 418.2 kg (922 lb). Hercules was featured on the
Today Show, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper 360, Inside Edition, and in a
Maxim article in 2005, when he was only three years old and already weighed
408.25 kg (900 lb). Hercules is healthy and is expected to live a long life.
The cat's breeding is said to have been a complete accident. Sinbad, another
liger, was shown on the National Geographic Channel.
Longevity
Shasta, a ligresss (female liger) was born at the
Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City on 14 May 1948 and died in 1972 at age 24. Valley
of the Kings animal sanctuary in Wisconsin had a male liger named Nook who
weighed over 550 kg (1,213 lb), and died in 2007, at 21 years old. Hobbs, a
male liger at the Sierra Safari Zoo in Reno, Nevada, lived to almost 15 years
of age before succumbing to liver failure and weighed in at 450 kg (992 lb).
This liger was born in 1943 and died in 1960. South Africa still has two ligers
at its one zoo at Bloemfontein.
Fertility
The fertility of hybrid big cat females is well
documented across a number of different hybrids. This is in accordance with
Haldane's rule: in hybrids of animals whose sex is determined by sex
chromosomes, if one sex is absent, rare or sterile, it is the heterogametic sex
(the one with two different sex chromosomes e.g. X and Y.
According to Wild Cats of the World (1975) by C. A.
W. Guggisberg, ligers and tigons were long thought to be sterile: in 1943, 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, though of delicate health, was
raised to adulthood. In September 2012, the Russian Novosibirsk Zoo announced
the birth of a "liliger”, which is the offspring of a liger mother and a
lion father. The cub was named Kiara.
Appearance
Ligers have a tiger-like striped pattern that is very faint upon a lionesque tawny background. In addition, they may inheritrosettes from the lion parent (lion cubs are rosetted and some adults retain faint markings). These markings may be black, dark brown or sandy. The background colour may be correspondingly tawny, sandy or golden. In common with tigers, their underparts are pale. The actual pattern and colour depend on which subspecies the parents were and on how the genes interact in the offspring.
White
tigers have been crossed with lions to produce "white" (actually pale
golden) ligers. In theory, white tigers could be crossed with white lions to
produce white, very pale or even stripeless ligers. There are no black ligers.
Very few melanistic tigers have ever been recorded, most being due to excessive
markings (pseudo-melanism or abundism) rather than true melanism; no reports of
black lions have ever been substantiated. As blue or Maltese tigers probably no
longer exist, grey or blue ligers are exceedingly improbable. It is not
impossible for a liger to be white, but it is very rare.
