Hello fellow plant ecologist! Also not a geneticist but aren’t triploid plants sterile? They can’t evenly split their chromosomes during meiosis.

Because of the risks associated with mating and pregnancy Farmers generally try to prevent ‘unnecessary’ mating. While I’m sure the mule wouldn’t consider it unnecessary, farmers generally want to restrict breeding opportunities to their chosen ‘studs’ (the males with the best stats essentially).

There is always a slight risk of injury during mating, and a pretty high risk during pregnancy. These are very valuable animals and even if you didn’t care about their well-being you would want to restrict mating and pregnancy to only be happening under optimal conditions.

Letting a mule try to get another animal pregnant to see if they are fertile or not just isn’t really worth it when raising livestock.

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Sure, but usually the liquefication plant fills it into dewars, and the magnet system needs to be refilled manually.

I think it means “per unit of x”, not mass specifically (excuse the pun). For example I sometimes have to report specific energy consumption for sites and that basically means MWh per unit of production or something like that (could be mass but not necessarily). It’s basically for benchmarking purposes

You’re associating amount of chromosomes with overall species complexity or advancement or something, which isn’t exactly how it works. More chromosomes isn’t necessarily “better” and fewer isn’t worse, and some of the species with the largest amounts of chromosomes are butterflies and various plants, with hundreds and even over a thousand chromosomes, while some mammals are…well, the Indian Muntjac. There are also some ~10 and into the low teens.

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Is their fertility due to improper division as a gamete? Like, one gamete ended up with 10 chromosomes and the other ended up with 8 instead of both ending up with 9? Oversimplifying, of course.

I’m only in undergrad, but I do all of my projects and papers on prions and I am under the impression the second thing you said is true, it’s just the genetic basis.

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In the creeping vole (Microtus oregoni) females are XO and males are XX. The offspring always get an X from their father, but their mother gives either an X or nothing.

This only works because their X chromosome carries some of the information that the Y carries in other species.

There is also a clever bit of coding that in most mammals causes less expression of the genes on the X chromosome in females (so that females don't have twice as many proteins running around their body.) And in creeping voles it only does so in males.

Creeping Vole Sex Determination

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Specific gravity is the ratio of the density of something relative to that of water. So water has a specific gravity of 1, while something more dense than water has a specific gravity greater than 1. This also means that specific gravity is unitless, while density is not (e.g. kg*m^-3)

But agreed that "specific" usually means per something or relative to something.

Exactly just like guppies and Betta are very different from natural and in the case of guppies there are like 4 or 5 species that they can cross with endlers, swordtails, mollies, platty, guppies can all interbreed with some complications some hybrids are too big for the mother to birth. Eg these are not viable Platy male and guppies female... Mollies male and female guppies, endlers female to anything except endlers. Where as swap the gender and you can hybrid.

And like some one else said hybridization is not something to separate from evolution as it can give leaps towards bigger changes if they are not viable they die if they end up beneficial to survival hybrid lives to mate and join the gene pool for either a whole new species or or in the case of what we believe happened to neanderthal proto humans out bred and some hybridization occured so basically their genes got poured into the pool and the hybrids diluted down

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A shockwave? Well, this happens with some frequency actually. Gravitational wave detectors are used nowadays to identify collisions between pairs of massive objects, like black hole pairs, neutron star pairs, or black holes and neutron stars. The waves generated in the very fabric of space time can only be detected by very sensitive detectors, because their effects are so slight by the time they reach us. We wouldn't notice those at all, without the necessary equipment.

Producing and carrying offspring is far more costly and risky than just producing sperm. One excellent example of this is flatworm penis-fencing where they battle to impregnate their opponent while avoiding it themselves.

Some point in our evolutionary history as mammals some mutation made it impossible for one side to get pregnant at all and only able to impregnate others thus freeing up resources for males to focus on getting as many females pregnant as they could. This strategy also carries the danger of relying entirely on others to reproduce. If females develop the ability to select only female offspring and not males then this can eliminate y-chromosomes entirely, something that has been theorized to have happened more than once already in our evolutionary past until a y-chromosome able to overcome this selectivity happened.

There are entire books on the topic of male-female reproductive strategies and cost-benefit analysis at the genome level which I won't go into as I don't have a teaching degree.

IDK what hospitals are doing, but I work in a physics lab, and nobody is ever letting their liquid helium just boil into the atmosphere unless something has gone catastrophically wrong. There's a whole infrastructure for recovering boiled off helium and sending it back to the liquefaction plant.

Our current definition of different species required then to not be compatible and apparently sapiens sapiens and sapiens neandathalensis were compatible at least to a certain point.

Forty__ gave a great answer. But just to add a more general conclusion. "Specific" usually means "per quantity of that thing." It doesn't necessarily need to be mass - although the two examples you gave are per mass. "Specific gravity" is a fancy word for density - or mass per volume.

And yeah its a horrible word. Doesn't make any sense with the normal English definition of specific. Old science terms are often bad science terms in modern English.

Wow, that's a pretty solid model.

Isn't FFI an example of what OP was wondering about? Or is it different because it's the gene responsible for causing it that's passed down, not the proteins themselves?