#galteans

It would be sad if they both wanted children! But, if they are child-free minded like myself then they probably wouldn’t mind (assuming lotura is endgame, which it might not be).

I would LOVE for VLD to pull in some real science of genetics and species hybridization by touching on this topic even if only in passing. At least give us Galteans and Humras as canon scientifically accurate terms!

But wait! Not all F1 hybrid males are sterile. In some interspecies mixes, it can depend upon the direction of the cross (e.g. unidirectional hybrid male sterility). I’m not sure how often this happens, since most of the interspecies hybrids that I’ve read about yield sterile males in both directions (e.g. both male ligers and male tigons are sterile, and that’s true of any Panthera crosses), but I do know that this occurs with some interspecies crosses of Drosophila.

Drosophila is a model organism for genetic research and the unidirectional hybrid male sterility between some of the subspecies is one of many reasons why.

“We show that, contrary to claims in the literature, “sterile” males resulting from the cross of the Bogota and USA subspecies of Drosophila pseudoobscura are weakly fertile. Surprisingly, these hybrid males produce almost all daughters when crossed to females of any genotype (pure Bogota, pure USA, hybrid F1). Several lines of evidence suggest that this sex ratio distortion is caused by sex chromosome segregation distortion in hybrid males. We genetically analyze this normally cryptic segregation distortion and show that it involves several regions of the Bogota X chromosome that show strong epistatic interactions with each other. We further show that segregation distortion is normally masked within the Bogota subspecies by autosomal suppressors.

Our analysis shows that the genetic basis of hybrid segregation distortion is similar to that of hybrid male sterility between the same subspecies. Indeed the severity of segregation distortion is correlated with the severity of sterility among hybrids. We discuss the possibility that hybrid sterility in this paradigmatic case of incipient speciation is caused by segregation distortion.”

[ Abstract from: Segregation Distortion in Hybrids Between the Bogota and USA Subspecies of Drosophila pseudoobscura by H. Allen Orr1 and Shannon Irving]

This means that some interspecies crosses will yield sterile males in only one direction. So, for VLD, this scenario would be only one direction of Galra and Altean crosses. So that could be the Galtean (e.g. male Galra + female Altean) or the Altra (e.g. male Altean + female Galra), or vice versa. Since the male hybrid would be weakly fertile in the cross that didn’t yield the sterile male, he would only father female children.

Yes, that’s correct about the mismatching. I doubt that any of the writers had the time to dig into this, or really, it wasn’t relevant in a Y7 show.

If Galrans and Alteans did not have the same chromosome count, then they would still have to be from the same genus in order for fertilization to occur and a fetus carried to term and survive infancy. In which case, the resulting hybrid offspring would be infertile regardless of sex due to mismatched chromosomes. The mule is the perfect example of this.

However, two species can be from the same genus and have the same number of chromosomes but those chromosome could have different kinds of pairings.

Example: Modern Humans and Neanderthals (from the genus homo), both have 23 pairs of chromosomes, but Neanderthals had a fused 2nd chromosome. They interbred with Modern Humans that had migrated from Africa and thus humans of certain populations (mostly caucasian) have small percentages of neanderthal DNA while other populations (such as those from Africa) do not.