• Question: How different do species have to be to be a different species?

    Asked by to Hannah, Anthony on 23 Jan 2019. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Hannah Cornish

      Hannah Cornish answered on 23 Jan 2019:

      This is an excellent question, and scientists still don’t always agree about the answer. There are lots of ways to define a species that are used by different scientists depending on what type of animal they are working on.

      Sometimes we tell species apart by how different they look, or how different their DNA is. A classic way to define a species is all the animals that can mate together and produce fertile offspring, but this doesn’t work for animals that reproduce asexually. We can also define species by where they live, how they behave and if the animals themselves recognise each other as potential mates.

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