There's been caimans here for years (strangely enough you never hear about them.) and they are much more closely related to alligators and they don't seem to hybridize either. I am going to go out on a limb a bit on this because I am not totally sure but I suspect all the "hybrid vigor" nonsense may be based plant crosses (which are going to involve a whole different set of variables than you find in animals) and wolfdogs which are technically not hybrids because wolves and dogs are the same species. Considering the line breeding that has gone on in dogs over the centuries their so called "hybrid vigor" when crossed with wolves is probably more of a refreshing of a limited gene pool.

Most other true hybrid crosses (mules those tiger/lion things) are usually sterile and when you really get down to it there isn't really that much hybridizing in nature beyond the subspecies level (which technically isn't a hybrid.). In fact the one example I can think of which occurs in (semi)nature is the coyote/dog crossing that happens when coyotes expand into new territory and it is my understanding that they die out after one generation.

I have never worked with african rocks before so I am not sure about how their breeding cycle is compared to burms but I have worked with a lot of plants from South Africa and I can tell that they are all pretty hard wired to bloom in our winter which of course is the Southern hemisphere's summer. I seem to remember Bert Langerwerf mentioning that in a lecture he once gave about some of the corydylid lizards he was working with. Of course they from southern africa as well.

It's just a few things to think about when they mention the whole "hybrid" thing.

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