In the news this week...

The NY Times, in the Tuesday issue of the Science Times, reported on animal hybrids! Who doesn't love a cool hybridized animal or plant?

I'm sure that you've probably heard of things like ligers before, but have you ever seen a wolphin? or a Pizzly Bear? Zorse? Yeah, pretty neat, huh?

The Sea Life Park in Hawaii inadvertently created a cross between a dolphin and a false orca, calling it a wolphin. A hunter in Canada shot a huge white and brown bear with long claws and a hump on its back. Scientists later discovered that it was a polar bear-grizzly hybrid.

These kinds of animals exist all over the place and some of them aren't completely unnatural. Sometimes these hybridizations create an organism better capable of surviving in a new, changing environment. This can create completely new species! Speciation by hybridization might become a more prevalent occurrence in today's rapidly changing ecosystems, especially as habitats begin to overlap, allowing geographically isolated species to interact. This habitat overlap has caused the creation of Pizzly bears in the Arctic and Subarctic of Canada.

Keep your eyes open for more of this kind of thing in the future!

You can find the whole NY Times article here.