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How Do You Define A Species

When you looked at pictures of the lemurs, you saw as many as seven different looking varieties (phenotypes). After looking at the pictures of the mating pairs, you narrowed it down to five. Next, you saw that most of them can mate with one another to produce fertile offspring - but two of them couldn't interbreed. Now it's time to look at their chromosomes and shed further light on their differences.

Look at each slide under the microscope and count the number of chromosomes you see.

  • How many distinct groups of lemurs are there based on chromosome number?
  • Which lemurs do you think are most closely related to one another?