VIDEO: World’s Largest Feline – the Liger

There are a lot of strange species of animals in the wild.

What’s even stranger is that sometimes hybrids are born from two totally different species.

Did you know that was even possible?!

Read more about it below and watch the video to meet the world’s largest feline – the liger!

According to Wikipedia, the liger is a hybrid cross between a male lion (Panthera leo) and a female tiger (Panthera tigris). The liger has parents in the same genus but of different species.

The liger is distinct from the similar hybrid tigon, and is the largest of all known extant felines. They enjoy swimming, which is a characteristic of tigers, and are very sociable like lions. Notably, ligers typically grow larger and are stronger than either parent species, unlike tigons.

The liger is often believed to represent the largest known cat in the world. Males reach a total length of 3 to 3.6 m, meaning they are larger than large Siberian tiger males, who are themselves usually larger than the larger lion species. Imprinted genes may be a factor contributing to the large size of ligers.

These are genes that may or may not be expressed on the parent they are inherited from, and that occasionally play a role in issues of hybrid growth. For example, in some dog breed crosses, genes that are expressed only when maternally-inherited cause the young to grow larger than is typical for either parent breed.

This growth is not seen in the paternal breeds, as such genes are normally “counteracted” by genes inherited from the female of the appropriate breed.

Other big cat hybrids can reach similar sizes; the litigon, a rare hybrid of a male lion and a female tigon, is roughly the same size as the liger, with a male named Cubanacan (at the Alipore Zoo in India) reaching 363 kg (800 lb). The extreme rarity of these second-generation hybrids may make it difficult to ascertain whether they are larger or smaller, on average than the liger.

It is wrongly believed that ligers continue to grow throughout their lives due to hormonal issues. It may be that they simply grow far more during their growing years and take longer to reach their full adult size. Further growth in shoulder height and body length is not seen in ligers over 6 years old, as in both lions and tigers.

Male ligers also have the same levels of testosterone on average as an adult male lion, yet are azoospermic in accordance with Haldane’s rule. In addition, female ligers may also attain great size, weighing approximately 320 kg (705 lb) and reaching 3.05 m (10 ft) long on average, and are often fertile. In contrast, pumapards (hybrids between pumas and leopards) tend to exhibit dwarfism.

Ligers are about the same size as the prehistoric Smilodon populator and American lion.

Shasta, a ligress (female liger) was born at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City on 14 May 1948 and died in 1972 at age 24. Valley of the Kings animal sanctuary in Wisconsin had a male liger named Nook who weighed over 550 kg (1,213 lb), and died in 2007, at 21 years old.