sutton026

A BC News made a short reportage on "De-extinction" of extinct species, focusing mainly on the quagga from 0:58 onwards. I think that most of my long-term readers will be familiar with the information provided, but there are nice shots of the Rau zebras. Should I ever be to South Africa, my goal would be certainly to visit one of the QP herds.  By the way, I really agree with what Dr. Robert Fleischer ( geneticist, one of the autors of "A rapid loss of stripes: the evolutionary history of the extinct quagga ) says in the video about the extinct-ness of the quagga, for reasons I outlined in previous posts ( see here ). However, I am not agreeing with the "we can do it but should we do it?" quote.

M y two little models of  aurochs bull and cow (for a precise description see here ) are now on permanent display at the Alpenzoo Innsbruck, for anyone who would like to see them in real: The Alpenzoo Innsbruck is a zoo in Innsbruck, Austria. It has virtually all vertebrate species living in the alpes, and I can definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in Central European wildlife. It also has a little herd of wisent, I think it is currently the only Austrian zoo having this species on display.

W hen comparing the anatomy of bison, yak and aurochs in flesh, there is one distorting factor: the fur. While the fur of the aurochs and cattle is roughly (very roughly) the same length all over its body, with exceptions on the tail and the forehead, yak have long hairs at the ventral side of their body, almost reaching the ground. Bison have a huge shock of hair on their head and neck and shoulders are covered in shaggy dense fur as well, while from the end of the shoulders onwards the body is virtually naked. The contrast is not that sharp in the wisent but still evident. These different types of coat make it difficult to compare the body shape and proportions between these four species because the life appearance of the animals is greatly altered. It would be a funny idea to take a bison, wisent and wild yak (of the same sex of course) and trim their coat, in order to see what their body is actually shaped like. But that won’t happen. So I took pieces of papers ...

W ild animal populations are not always completely homogeneous regarding their colouration. This is not surprising of course, otherwise their colour would never undergo an evolutionary process. Point mutations happen, and in some cases they either provide a fitness advantage or become fixed by genetic drift or both. The chance for that should be higher when there are considerable biotic/abiotic changes or very active population dynamics incl. bottleneck events occur, or - again - both. Colour mutations can also have negative effects, either because they are linked to deficiencies or diseases, or provide a fitnes disadvantage. Such disadvantageous colour mutations consequently disappear quickly, may be only a singular event. But sometimes new colour morphs are neutral and keep showing up in the population for a considerable time. Famous examples are melanistic leopards and jaguars (leucistic tigers seemingly have disadvantages in the wild). As a side note, of course such mutations are t...