The San Diego Wild Animal Park has discovered breeding cheetahs to be a challenge, because the females do not show any obvious behaviors revealing their reproductive state. But they did find when males sniff areas where female cheetahs have been, they sometimes utter a unique call known as: the stutterbark.
Males will emit this call again and again and again while they pace their enclosure and check out the female cheetahs in the nearby enclosures. When the females hear the calls, they don’t respond at first. But when they hear some of the males call, it seems to trigger their hormone system and turn on some special behaviors.
So they used some software to create a brand-new stutterbark that they played to the cheetahs at the Zoo’s Wild Animal Park research area.
After hearing the sound of this “new male,” one of the cheetahs, Kenya, became very, very excited. She started rolling around in the grass on her back, lifted up her tail tip and wagged it, and seemed to be checking out the male cheetahs nearby. When she was placed with a male named Quando, the two of them proceeded to mate. This was good news and the first time that cheetah breeding had resulted from using a sound recording.
Afterwards, Kenya’s fecal samples were regularly checked for specific hormones to see if she was pregnant. Cheetahs are pregnant for about three months, and it looked like the breeding took. With great anticipation they monitored her reproductive state and hoped for a new cheetah cub or a litter of cubs, since cheetahs often have three to four babies at a time. Kenya did not disappoint. She produced a daughter, but because it was only a single baby, and her first cub, caretaking was a bit of a problem. So the baby was brought to the Park’s Animal Care Center and was incorporated into their cheetah education program.
So here is the Good News: there is help being given to assist the survival of this magnificent creature. Several ongoing projects are doing some fine work to expand our knowledge and encourage the breeding of one of my favorite animals.
Find out more Tomorrow….. Jacquie
