A rare cross between a tiger and a lion has been born in a zoo that is touring Russia. It was being nurtured with milk from a neighboring goat.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
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Meet Tzar the Liger
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The liger club is healthy and active, according to zoo officials. Tsar is being fed with milk from a goat at the zoo.
The breed is rare because the chances of a tiger having cubs with a lion are very slim. Many animal rights groups criticize breeders as cruel, given the breed's health problems and frequent deformities.
Ligers grow very big in size, often larger than both their parents. Hercules, the largest liger in the world, weighs 418 kilograms (920 pounds).
Hybrid animals - freaks of nature, or evolution?
Ligers, tigrons and grolar bears - oh my! No, these are not made up creatures, but rather hybrids: animals born as a product of two different species.
Image: Getty Images/Afp/Tiziana Fabi
Freaks of the animal world?
Often hybrid animals are purposefully bred. But due also to forces of nature, animals migrate further than before, mating with other species already in the region. This is making for some weird and wonderful crossbreeds.
Image: imago/ZUMA Press
Climate change hybrid
One such animal that is now being found in nature is the grolar bear - the product of, you guessed it, grizzly and polar bears. Melting ice caps have seen polar bears moving south, while the warmer climate means grizzly bears are migrating north. This means that larger areas of their territories are overlapping, giving them more chance to crossbreed.
Image: Reuters/J. Urquhart
Swimming free
Scientists have called natural crossbreeding between different types of blacktip shark off the coast of Australia "evolution in action." For some hybrid species, like the offspring of common blacktip and Australian blacktip sharks, this means the best of both genepools - such as being able to cope in both tropical as well as cooler waters.
Image: picture-alliance/WILDLIFE
Extinct possibilities
But it’s not all positive. There is the fear that crossbreeding will lead to the extinction of animals like the polar bear. As the population decreases, the likelihood that polar bears will mate instead with grizzly bears increases as does the probability that polar bears could eventually disappear.
Image: AFP/Getty Images/P. J. Richards
'Irresponsible breeders'
Many hybrids suffer from genetic abnormalities, are more prone to disease and are often infertile. One such animal is the liger. A cross between a male lion and a tigress, this produces a creature that Big Cat Rescue calls a result of "irresponsible breeders" looking to make money. This animal does not occur naturally in the wild.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Y. Kurskov
Unexpected arrival
Breeding hybrids in zoos is frowned upon. But on farms, It's hard to stop nature. Rarely, there have been cases where sheep and goats have found each other and decided to … well, you know. The result is a geep, like this one born in Ireland.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Murphy
Nature will find a way
Regardless of the positives or negatives of hybrids, some animals will even go out of their way to consummate their interspecies love. Back in 2013, a male zebra jumped over the fence of his enclosure to mate with a female donkey in Florence, Italy. The result was this cute little zonkey called Ippo.
Image: Getty Images/Afp/Tiziana Fabi
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"The mother (tiger) was in heat but there were no tigers, and we saw that she was suffering (without a male tiger) so we decided to put her together with a lion. Because they lived next to each other for a long time before it worked," said Eric Airapetyan, director of the Samara Circus, which is currently touring and performing in Kamensk.
"You can't find them in the wild because one lives in Africa and the other in the jungle in the woods. It just happens in a zoo. I looked it up on the Internet. There are only 23 of them in the world."
As to why the zoo named the liger cub Tsar, Airapetyan said: "Since his father is Cesar and his mother is Princess we decided to call him Tzar."
