Mother Nature Network posted an article about a duck who was genetically modified and mated with a female chicken to produce a baby chicken. It started by injecting the duck embryo with chicken germ cells then as the duck matured it was able to chicken sperm instead of duck sperm. This allowed the duck to mate with a chicken and father baby chicken. Scientist are hopefully genetic modification will help endangered species and even bring back extinct species. I think this discovery is very interesting and may possibly benifit species on the brink of extinction but I think it may eventually lead to issues. For example does the baby chicken have duck genes and chicken genes, will it be able to reproduce with a chicken, a duck, both or maybe it will be sterile. I would assume you can consider these animals hybrids so what kind of impact would these hybrid animals cause to pure lines in the wild? This sounds to me like it would have more negative impacts then good.
The article:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/duck-successfully-fathers-a-chickenAnother article:
http://grist.org/list/baby-chicken-whose-father-is-a-duck-is-either-a-new-hope-for-extinct-species-or-a-sign-of-the-end-times/[caption id="attachment_7585" align="alignnone" width="470" caption="Duck Fathers Baby Chicken"]
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Wow this is really cool! Its good to know that there may be a way to save endangered species. There's another blog post about koalas maybe this could be a possible solution for the future!
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