Researchers will inseminate female ocelots in zoos with sperm from the few remaining wild ocelots, then train kittens for the wild
Research veterinarian Ashley Reeves had a rough week in mid-August. She had hoped to artificially inseminate ocelots at three zoos as part of a project to save these small, elegant spotted cats in the wild. But one female failed to ovulate, another had complications with her egg, and sperm for the third had lost much of its motility—its ability to travel into the oviduct and fertilize an egg—during shipment to the zoo, all of which made pregnancy less likely.
Texas ocelots favor a particularly prickly type of habitat called thorn scrub: dense brush composed of spiky plants. Useless to people, most thorn scrub has been removed as agriculture, urbanization and the border wall consume much of southern Texas’s landscape. Yet the nonprofit East Foundation, founded in 2007 to demonstrate that ranching and wildlife can coexist, owns 217,000 acres of ranchland in prime ocelot territory—and a significant amount of it is still a thorn scrub region.
Conservation biologists generally like to retain the unique genetic makeup of each lineage of a species in the wild, which can vary throughout its range. But scientists such as William Swanson—who directs animal conservation research at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and assisted Reeves with the artificial insemination procedures—believe Texas ocelots will benefit from new genes that zoo ocelots can provide.
Artificial insemination is tricky, however, and Paul Marinari, senior curator at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, thinks relying solely on this technique is a risk. Marinari’s team has depended heavily on natural breeding to build up the captive population of endangered black-footed ferrets—a member of the weasel family that was reduced to 18 individuals in the 1980s—and reintroduce them to the plains of North America.
Reeves and Swanson artificially inseminated nine zoo ocelots with sperm from the wild Texas animals in 2021 and 2022, and no pregnancies resulted. They plan on three more efforts later this year. But freezing sperm, a necessity when recovering semen from wild males in the field, reduces its motility. Inbreeding in the isolated wild ocelots further diminishes this. Yet in the past Swanson successfully inseminated three zoo ocelots using frozen nonwild sperm, resulting in kittens.
The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and its partners in ferret rewilding keep animals slated for release in natural enclosures, ensure they have live prey to hunt and then place them in preconditioning pens with colonies of prairie dogs for 30 days. “Anyone who survives that—not sleeping on the ground or cohabitating with prairie dogs—goes on to reintroduction,” Marinari says. Studies show that preconditioning helps the ferrets’ survival rate.
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