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95castles t1_j963ies wrote

Reply to comment by Batgod629 in Flaco the escaped zoo owl can remain in the wilds of NYC by citytiger

MAYBE they manage to have offspring, but I highly doubt those offspring would be fertile.

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resistible t1_j9ajjs4 wrote

Yeah, it could totally be as ineffective a hybridazation as coywolves... wait.

The reality is that of all the predictors we have of whether two species can hybridize, this guy checks a few of those boxes with at least one of the local species. We don't have enough understanding to say very much about viable hybrid offspring coming from this animal.

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95castles t1_j9ak2do wrote

Yeah more research is needed. I would like to be wrong because I find the idea of hybridization to be very interesting. But yeah, I think it’s much more likely for the offspring to not be fertile. And that’s if they do manage to mate in the first place.

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resistible t1_j9aszxq wrote

I don't think they even mate. But I wouldn't have thought that of wolves and coyotes, either. So here we are lol

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