Are hybrid tortoises fertile?

Answer

Hi Sebastian

Everything depends a bit on the species concept used. There are many different definitions or thoughts by which a species is described. Thus exists the phenetic, ecological, type, … and biological species concept. There are so many of them because no single definition of the term ‘species’ applies to all the animals we find on Earth. There are always some exceptions for which your definition is incorrect.

Currently, the ‘biological species concept’ is mainly still used, which says that a species contains all individuals that can reproduce with each other with the production of FRUITFUL offspring (which will therefore also be able to reproduce in turn). That said, a horse and a donkey may be closely related species, but two different species because their eventual young are sterile; dogs are breeds of 1 species because the different breeds can interbreed and give fertile offspring.

Coming to your question: if two different turtle species could have offspring then those young will be infertile, and that might be a nice thing to do, but it will lead to nothing. Remember: if such young are released into the wild, they will not genetically disrupt anything as they cannot reproduce. If, on the other hand, the young of the two tortoises are found to be fertile, then we must conclude that the two original tortoises were mistakenly regarded as two species and that they are the same biological species which may then apparently have quite a few individual differences in character or color. . If animals of the same kind have children, there is of course nothing wrong with that.

I hope you could follow it.

Kind regards

Dominick Verschelde