No one who has seen a cheetah up close, felt it purr with pleasure like a fine racing car, or had the opportunity to touch its fur to black spots, thick as synthetic grass, will ever forget that experience. His amber eyes seem to shed black tears to counteract the reflection of the sun on the blond grasslands. Impossibly graceful, streamlined, spindly, they move like no other creature in the animal kingdom, extending infinite legs as their flexible spine yields like a spring on the run. It is not surprising that with such totemic power the cheetahs, also called leopards and in some areas cheetahs -from the English cheetah-, were pets or hunting companions of pharaohs and princes, and that their statues adorned the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Nobody beats you on the mainland in speed. Able to accelerate from 0 to 112 kilometers per hour in 4 seconds and cover 7.5 meters with each stride, the cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus, is the supreme sprinter of the wild. Its body, which weighs no more than 50 kilos, forms an unadorned chassis to support the great motor of the legs. Their favorite prey, gazelles and antelopes, jump as if they had wings, while the cheetah glides silently, camouflaged among the undergrowth thanks to its black spots, which break any symmetry. By the time the victim finds out, it is too late. With the giant heart pumping enormous amounts of blood, the tail acting as a directional paddle and the legs making abrupt turns without losing the rhythm of the pursued, the cheetah knocks him down on the ground and in seconds suffocates him to death with a bite to the neck.
The gift of speed, however, comes at a price. The chases do not last more than half a minute, cover a distance of about 170 meters and the metabolic cost for the animal is great: since it is condemned to hunt in the middle of the afternoon – in order not to compete with lionesses and hyenas – it is exposed to the extreme heat that other hunters avoid at all costs. During a race, your internal temperature rises to 40.5 ° C, a level that can cause brain damage if you hold it for more than a minute. Half of the races end successfully, and at the end of the hunt the cat is so exhausted and overheated that it waits at least fifteen minutes before starting to eat. And if at this moment another animal intervenes to take away its food, the shy cheetah simply gets up and leaves, avoiding a confrontation for which it has no energy. When things go even worse, the aggressor also takes her puppies.
It’s hard to be a cheetah. For them, the line between life and death is very thin and their existence is full of challenges that never seem to end. On the one hand, there are problems related to the deterioration of their habitat and the threat of human predation, and on the other, they are genetically poor creatures. They have a low fertility rate, a high incidence of birth defects, and weak immune systems. “We have adored them for thousands of years and at the same time pushed them to the brink of extinction,” says Dr. Laurie Marker, an athletic 54-year-old woman who is probably the most cheetah-savvy person in the world. His doctoral thesis from the University of Oxford, Aspects of the biology and ecology and conservation strategies of the cheetah, which he presented in 2002, is considered the last word on these cats.
Marker is director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) – Cheetah Conservation Foundation – an organization she established in 1990 that has become a model for wildlife management with a visionary new approach. “There was a time when there were cheetahs in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa,” he laments. “But now they no longer exist in Asia, in Iran there are about 100, and in the wild in Africa there are not more than 10,000 left. In 230 zoos in 60 countries there are 1,400 in captivity, but that is not a sustainable population. Annually more cubs die than the That is why it is so important to maintain wild populations, because it is the way to save the species. ” And that is literally what Marker and his collaborators are doing in Namibia. One of the problems with the cheetah is that its natural habitat has been colonized by livestock, and in Africa ranchers do not beat around the bush. They set traps everywhere and shoot the cats indiscriminately to keep them away from their cattle. Before Marker took action – he sold his possessions in the United States and settled in Namibia 17 years ago – farmers exterminated more than 600 cheetahs annually.
With conservation as his goal, Marker has been visiting ranchers door-to-door for years to build friendly relationships and teach them that it is possible to live with wild cheetahs. “I tell them that they are not able to eat an adult cow. That the vital thing is to protect the calves, taking their mothers to a safe place when they are ready to give birth. Here in Namibia, we have wildlife, livestock and an ecosystem. unique, and these three elements are not incompatible; you just have to implement a good farming system and learn to live with cats. I explain to people that cheetahs do not approach donkeys, and that Anatolian sheepdogs, which endure the heat better than other breeds, they are able to keep them at bay, “says Marker.
The CCF, which is a non-profit foundation that raises a million dollars a year in donations, raises dogs, trains them and gives them away to ranchers. The result is that many Namibians have stopped shooting the leopards and even take to Marker’s ranch – 48 kilometers from Otjiwarongo, northwest Namibia – the specimens that fall in their traps and the stranded cubs. In fact, more than 40 orphans live on the ranch whose food is a full-time job for CCF staff. The wild cheetah population in Namibia has long been stable at around 3,000 individuals and has even started to grow. And this is due to Laurie Marker, who has established educational and scientific ties with universities and institutions in various countries. She is the great matriarch that unites the other research centers for the conservation of these felines.
“The biggest problem facing wildlife protection is that you have to address the needs of humans,” explains Marker. And he adds: “When you live in a poor country, you realize that conservation does not make any impression on the population, because the priority is to feed themselves. What we have seen in Namibia is that if the inhabitants are given the power to to be part of the rules, they are the ones who make them come into force. Our job is to change people’s attitudes, and our strategy is to maintain the animal’s habitat and try to find new lands where it can live and be tolerated. ” The CCF ranch, which is fully supported by the Namibian government, now has more than 50 cheetahs of all ages, where Marker, his staff and volunteers – who pay to cooperate – mark them, release them, follow them, They take blood samples, collect their feces to examine their hormonal level, help their reproduction and store their embryos in liquid nitrogen.
On the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States, experts at the forefront of the country’s zoos and those who work in collaboration with Marker have been dedicated for almost three decades to the second group of problems that affect the cheetah: its genes and its reproduction. In 2003, the biologist Stephen O? Brien wrote in his book Cheetah Tears: “They are complicated. In captivity they are nervous, suspicious and neurotic. They do not like to reproduce, they have low fertility and the mortality rate of newborns is of the 30%, much higher than that of other mammals born in captivity. ” In 1980, researchers at the National Zoo in Washington DC began examining the reproductive patterns of the leopard cat and conducted the first studies of its DNA. David Wildt, an expert reproductive biologist, examined semen under a microscope and found that the sperm concentration was only one-tenth that of domestic cats, and that 70% of the sperm were malformed. For example, the flagella that propel them were bent sideways, and the heads were either too large or too small. In other species, these defects are associated with infertility.
For his part, O’Brien, who was studying the domestic cat as an experimental model for human cancers of viral origin, did not believe the result of the genetic analysis of the cheetah blood samples that Wildt sent him. In 1986, the two researchers wrote in Scientific American: “We analyzed 40 semen and blood samples from 18 males. We found no difference in the 52 genes we observed. They were the same. Virtually twins.” To determine if there was any catastrophic incest among members of this species, they analyzed more samples with three different techniques. And to clear up doubts, they took skin samples from eight cheetahs from the Wildlife Safari animal park in Oregon, where Marker worked at the time, and grafted them onto other specimens. Normally, the recipient of an implant tends to reject it, unless it is very similar immunologically to the donor. Even in these cases the help of immunosuppressive drugs is needed.
But the cheetahs did not reject the skin graft, which was alarming. This meant that their immune systems were so identical that the animals were exposed to the same diseases. “As Darwin stipulated a century ago, genetic uniformity reduces the ability of a species to adapt to ecological disturbances, such as temperature changes, droughts, glaciations and the appearance of new viruses or bacteria,” says O? Brien. the raw material of evolution “. In fact, two years after grafting, an epidemic of viral peritonitis wiped out 60% of the cheetahs at Wildlife Safari.
Why are they so genetically poor compared to other species? “Our hypotheses were based on the fact that there was a time when cheetahs had the same genetic variety that other cats have today,” says O’Brien. But about 12,000 years ago, something happened that wiped out almost all cheetahs. The few survivors interbred with each other, with disastrous consequences for their genetic pools. The most obvious catastrophe was the last ice age, that period of extreme cold that wiped out mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, and other prehistoric mammals. The cheetah appeared about 200,000 years ago, but that bottleneck of 12,000 years ago wiped out almost everyone, even those who lived in North America.
The approach to saving them from extinction must result from a combination of strategies. One of them is to protect and study wild specimens. The other is to examine their biology and refine the breeding techniques of those in captivity. And for that there is an intimate cooperation between all zoos, which keep an exact diary of each of the animals in the country, with their complete reproductive history. In this way, breeders plan annually who is going to be crossed with whom to guarantee greater genetic diversity. “It turns out that everything is linked,” says Wildt. “The gene problem is the result of losing their precious habitat: animals cannot disperse and the consequence is inbreeding, which undermines reproductive health.” Wildt and Dr. Adrienne Crosier work at the National Zoo’s Research and Conservation Center, which recently opened a wing dedicated exclusively to leopards. The center is far from the zoo, in Front Royal, Virginia, and is dedicated to studying the reproduction and behavior of a handful of little-known endangered species, including the cloud leopard and several rare ungulates.
“We have learned, for example, that it is very difficult to successfully freeze sperm from this feline,” says Crosier, who worked with Marker in Namibia and hopes to be able to import some of the African cheetahs in the near future to strengthen the genes of domestic ones. . “As the eggs are also extremely fragile, the most effective is to freeze the embryos, as we did in Namibia. Then we thaw them and place them in the uterus of a female. But the best way to generate a baby is to get two adults to interbreed. naturally”.
This sounds easier than it is. If there are places where you can successfully raise animals au naturel, those are the beautiful expanses of grass at the White Oak Conservation Center in North Florida, a one-of-a-kind conservation sanctuary that invites love. The 23 cheetahs in this luxurious private zoo live peacefully in pens located in the middle of a forest, where they exercise by running after a decoy similar to that of greyhound racing. The system of interconnected enclosures makes it easy to take them to the alley of lovers, equivalent to the corner bar, to stimulate romance.
With information from the diary of all cheetahs destined for breeding in North America, Karen Meeks, the supervisor of the White Oak carnivores, has the difficult mission of identifying the right mates and getting the marriage consummated. “It sounds nice, but with cheetahs nothing is easy,” says Meeks, who also spent time in Namibia with Marker. “Since the females only get warm when they receive some stimulus, I have to take the chosen male to walk near the rooms of the cat and carefully observe its reaction. They must emit a specific vocalization, but each male reacts in a different way. a different way. There are some who call shyly and others who start running like crazy. And sometimes it happens that the cheetah that goes crazy with love is not the one I need for that particular female, and then I have to figure out how to do it. the meeting of the perfect couple “.
“We keep a meticulous diary of the daily life of each animal,” says Fran Lyon, conservation coordinator. “Who is whose neighbor, who has fought with whom … There are cheetahs that can’t stand each other, and there are those that can’t. live a second without the other. This happens a lot with sibling males, although some females also really suffer if you separate them. And all this affects their interest in reproducing. That is why it is so difficult that in a typical zoo, where there are so many people and so much noise, two cheetahs mate. Anything distracts them, inhibits them, makes them nervous. “
After copulation comes the tricky thing, which is to determine if the cat is pregnant, an unpleasant task that consists of searching and collecting the feces of the mated females to make an analysis of their estrogen levels. And if unfortunately the female only gives birth to a cub, Meeks and Lyon have to get into the role of mothers, because the mother, conditioned by evolution to take care of at least two young, will abandon him on the spot. “That means we have to teach the little one what it means to be a cheetah. And it’s not easy,” says Meeks.
But they are doing something right in White Oak, because all the cats they have brought from the Laurie Marks ranch in Namibia have first bred with each other and then with the park ones, which is the recipe for genetic variation. The last four cubs were born as of this writing. “The parents are Namibian cats, so we have very valuable genes,” Meeks announces in an email. This sharing of genes, resources, and knowledge between wild and captive-manipulated cheetah populations represents their life assurance. In the absence of human persecution and despite their genetic poverty, malformations of their sperm and susceptibility to viruses, the truth is that these cats have managed to survive. Now, however, they need a good push to restore their lost habitat.
King George, the Miami Zoo’s cheetah ambassador, tangles between my legs, purring and demanding touches. Soon he is covered in that thick, shaggy fur that, fortunately for him, is of no value in the fur industry. Its rare spots are elongated, not round, because it is a real cheetah, Acinonyx rex, something like an albino tiger. King George has educated children more than any biology teacher. It’s easy, now that I put my arms around his neck, to understand Laurie Marker’s passion. It is an honest, elegant, mysterious animal. The greyhound of the felines. Will it be able to flee from its own extinction?
“I love every part of cheetahs,” concludes Marker. “Their smoothness, their arrogance, their speed. And they are fading before our eyes. The more I learn about them, the more I want the whole world to know about them.”
Angela Posada-Swafford
