Cheetahs are outliers among wildcats. They don’t roar, but they purr like domestic cats. Females are solitary, while males hang with their littermate for life. And they are notoriously picky about who they mate with. Cheetahs also lack genetic diversity due to several bottlenecks in their evolutionary history that caused populations to fall to dangerous levels. And there’s a lot we still don’t know about cheetahs. But a facility in Front Royal, Virginia, is leading the way in cheetah research and breeding. It’s the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
Nick has spent his entire life in these hills at SCBI, where 21 endangered species are bred and researched. The cheetah program is considered one of the facility’s biggest success stories. Over the last five years, SCBI has been responsible for bringing 34 healthy cheetah cubs into the world and contributing a wealth of scientific research to our understanding of the species. The goal is to gain knowledge that will help conserve cheetahs in the wild. Because of their nomadic nature and vast territories, studying cheetahs in situ has always been a difficult task, and a large portion of what we now know about the species—their health, fertility, endocrinology, genetics—came from research done on captive cats.
But there are conservationists who question whether this strategy does much to help the wild population. With just an estimated 10,000 cheetahs remaining in the wild and everything from habitat destruction, to conflicts with farmers and the exotic pet trade threatening the species’s survival, is this strategy the most effective way to protect these cats? What good is a friendly cheetah in Virginia to the ones facing extinction in the wild?
For one thing, producing cheetah cubs for zoos eliminates the necessity of taking wild cheetahs out of their natural African habitat. But to produce enough cheetahs, the SCBI went through a steep learning curve. Read about the problems in breeding cheetahs and what the research center is doing to overcome them at Motherboard. -via Digg
(Image credit: Derek Mead/Motherboard)