San Diego Zoo San Diego Zoo News 2011

I went to the zoo the other day and a keeper told me that they just received a male Bolivian jaguar to breed with the female Nindiri. He'll be in quarantine for about 30 days before being moved to EO to begin the introduction process.

 

Exciting news! We have a new male mandrill also. I think he has been here about a month. His name is Jasper. I don't know what zoo he came from. Oh, the crested screamers are sitting on a nest of 6 eggs!

 

Bolivian Jaguar? I'm amazed at the number of subspecies this zoo has or identify. Bolivian Jaguar, Transvale Lion, Desert Warthog....... (Let's see) I have know problem with this at all but I wonder if they have a dude that can identify subspecies by just smelling them. jk. I think it is pretty cool but then again there the only zoo I know who does this. Usually zoos will have African Lion, Jaguar, Puma, and warthog.... Can anyone explain this and why SOME other zoos don't.

 

I don't think Alaskan Peninsula Bear is a subspecies of the grizzly bear, as the grizzly bear is a subspecies by itself.

 

@KCZoo Fan- thanxs. i'll change it to transvale lion.

 

There are no subspecies of jaguar. I suspect, however, that it is a jaguar that was imported from Bolivia, which would be great news for the genetic diversity of the captive population (assuming he breeds).

 

The keeper was pretty confident that they would have babies. I assume in a month we'll begin to see some news show up on the zoo site about this.

 

Sorry for long post only on jaguars! If you don't care about jaguar taxonomy you can skip this post and proceed to next post

That there are no jaguar subspecies is very much a matter of debate and the view that it is monotypic is largely based on Larson (1997) that ONLY looked at cranial differences. No other measurements or pelage color/pattern. Secondly the misunderstanding that subspecies under the biological species concept always show well in DNA studies when it now is well known that even differences between biological species don't always show well. See this for example http://www.umbc.edu/biosci/Faculty/OmlandLabWebpage/NewPages/papers/FunkOmlandARev.pdf

Even though genetics don't always work well for subspecies some patterns have emerged in the most complete check of the jaguars. There were differences depending on you looking at mtDNA or microsatellite DNA but Eizirik, Kim, Menotti-Raymond, Crawshaw, O'Brien, Johnson (2001) revealed four jaguar more or less distinct clades: 1. Mexico+northern Central America, 2. southern Central America, 3. South America north of Amazon river, 4. South America south of Amazon river. There is a risk they misinterpreted one of the results because they had no jaguars from the Choco region. In biogeography it is often closer to southern Central America than South America east of the Andes. For some reason they assumed Darien was a border between group 2 and group 3 but it is at least as likely to be the northern Andes and early morphological reviews have placed jaguars in southern Central America and Choco together in the race centralis. Ruiz-Garcia, Payan, Murillo & Alvarez (2006) also found differences in microsatellite DNA between jaguars east and west of the Andes in Colombia. Based on mtDNA by Eizirik (2001) the earliest divergence among jaguar populations happened 280 000-510 000 years ago. Easily enough for subspeciation. There are also two isolated populations that haven't been checked at all using modern DNA tecniques: western Peru (possible race peruviana) and Arizona to northwest Mexico (possible race arizonensis). This is phylogenetic and made by proponents of this concept making it hard to accurately translate into the biological species concept but Eizirik et al. (2001) did specifically comment on captive jaguars and that the different populations shouldn't be mixed if it can be avoided:

Although the isolation generated by these localized barriers does not seem to be complete, management options which increase migration across them (e.g. field translocations or captive breeding of Amazonian individuals from the two sides of the river) should be avoided or minimized to approximate natural historical processes. Our results are compatible with currently favoured strategies for jaguar conservation on a broad regional basis (Medellín et al., in press), having largescale biomes or ecosystems as operational management units. This strategy is advisable both in terms of maintaining jaguars as an important component of functional ecosystems and as a flagship species for overall regional conservation. This management approach is also appropriate considering the possibility of local adaptation to different habitats, which would probably not be detected by our molecular markers (Lynch 1996), particularly given the number of samples analysed.

 

We went to the zoo on Friday 1/14/2011 and the Wolf's Guenons are back with the pigmy hippos.

 

This should have been posted on the San Diego Wild Animal Park forum, NOT the San Diego Zoo forum. Just some friendly advice, in case you didn't realize each San Diego facility has its own thread.

 

Do you recall what was in the glassed-in enclosure next to the orangutans? This is where the Wolf's guenons were before I believe.

 

When the Orangutan enclosure was remodeled several years ago, the original residents of the glassed-in enclosure were douc langurs. They did not do well in the exhibit and were replaced by francois langurs.

 

Right and it more recently held Wolf's guenons. Now if the Wolf's guenons are back with the Pygmy hippos, then what is in this enclosure currently.

 

Eastern Angolan colobus monkeys.

 

There is a new baby Hippo!
Baby hippo born Wednesday at the San Diego Zoo - SignOnSanDiego.com

 

great news havent had a hippo birth in the us in a while

 

Topeka Zoo, August 2010

 

o sorry 4got about that

 

No biggie, not a very well known zoo, but it does seem hippo births have been lacking.

 

Almost certainly by design. It's not easy outplacing young adult hippos (especially males).