How Do You Define A Species  REPRODUCTIONYou should have seen at most 5 different lemurs. Now let's try looking at them another way. Because males and females of the same organism (or even particular individuals) can look very different from one another, one way scientists define species is organisms that mate in nature and produce fertile offspring. Click on any two of the lemur pictures you looked at before to find out if these kinds of lemurs can interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
Defining a species is more complicated than you might think.
Some species have only one sex and reproduce by cloning, others have many more than 2 sexes. Others that would never interbreed in nature can produce fertile offspring. (e.g. female ligers (offspring from a lion and tiger) are 95% fertile).
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How many species do you think there are now?
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