San Diego Zoo Safari Park San Diego Zoo Safari Park 2020

The only bomas I know of in the park are the bomas located along the Africa tram route, where they usually keep new animals in quarantine. Presuming it's the same bomas, then yes, they're very visible to the public.

 

I got a respond from the Safari Park through Facebook comment that Kendi will be placed in South African Mix-Species Field Exhibut.

 

Is that the exhibit Aria is in the parks other black rhino??

 

Actually Aria is located in the Central African Field Exhibit.
Both Kendi and Aria are two different Black Rhino subspecies
Aria is a South-Central Black Rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis minor)
Kendi is a Eastern Black Rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis michaeli)

 

I thought Aria was Also an eastern black rhino? Because according to worldrhino.com her parents are both Eastern black rhinos
Aria #1113 - Rhinos of the World

 

All About Aria
Even though she is referred to a Southern Black Rhino.
the zoo she came from is Zoo Miami which keeps South-Central Black Rhinos.

 

huh? So does this mean that Kendi and Aria will not breed together??

 

I am afraid you missed a few alleys here.

Aria is descended from a long line of rhinos traceable to imports from Kenya and close surrounding countries. Hence, the subspecies is Eastern black rhino. Miami Zoo never kept any other ssp. The AZA has one SSP for black rhino the eastern race as they concluded not sufficient space for 2 black rhino ssp., so Southern black rhino program is mostly a private ranches and/or large breeding facilities like White Oak program. This population is decreasing as founders die out and offspring insufficient to maintain the program.

You might also have mixed up Miami MZ with Milwaukee which does maintain both, but with only an elderly southern minor cow left and a subadult eastern held on loan from another zoo (longterm probably changing to eastern I guess in line with the current SSP). The southern minor program is administered by IRF rhino conservation foundation. Realistically, the latter program will only remain White Oak et al and a more robust effort in Australia (my informed guess).

 

That's right, both Aria and Kendi are Eastern Black Rhinos. It is likely that they should breed together, even if they are a bit related (they have the same grandmother) as you can see in the website.

 

Wait if they have the same grandmother than why would the AZA have them breed together? That’s inbreeding last time I checked

 

I think I made a mistake there.
So since Black Rhinos are solitary which is why both Kendi and Aria are put in two separate field exhibits until breeding purposes which is a risk if one of the rhinos starts chasing and attacking the other.
This isn’t the first time the safari park had attempted to put these shy and aggressive rhino species in a multi-species exhibit. They used to live in a separate exhibit which is now the rhino rescue center.
And how will this progress with the presence of a black rhino calf born and running about?

 

It isn't frequently talked about, but a lot of AZA species actually have a lot of inbreeding in their populations. Admittedly they usually don't recommend breeding that close of relations, but if you spend a lot of time in studbooks, you'll find mother-son pairings (likely unintentional) to be fairly common. That being said, Kendi is only about 3 years old I think, and male black rhinos don't receive breeding recommendations before age 7-8 (female black rhinos are apparently generally uninterested before then).

 

ok but these two rhinos though are a bit related if they both have the same grandmother. and what species exactly inbreed with each other within AZA species

 

Depends on how specific you define inbreeding. In a short answer to your question, all of them (except for a few).

 

So every animal species in AZA zoos are inbred? In that case why are we breeding them still since they have no conservation value

 

Inbreeding isn’t a black and white thing. The SSPs look at the genetics as a whole to determine compatibility to minimize the negative effects of inbreeding to keep the population sustainable. Yes, if you continually breed closely related animals together, you will run into a host of issues related to inbreeding but on the macro scale, a species with less than 5,000 individuals is already bottlenecked to the point where inbreeding is unavoidable. But it is possible to have sustainable populations form from small populations of related individuals. Look at the California condor which had 22 individuals at one point but are now in the hundreds. There had to be inbreeding at some point. Black-footed ferrets is another example where the original captive stock was 17 breeding ferrets. In the late 2000s they actually reintroduced sperm from some of those ferrets back into the population to diversify it a little more. Genetics can be a bit complicated.

 

You know in the park’s early history, the black rhinos used to live in the East African field exhibit, but caused problems like charging at the other animals and a male flittering chased a female into the park’s lake and the staff have to rescue it and now lived in their own enclosure until the construction of the rhino rescue center in it’s place.
(Info came from the book “A World of Animals: San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park”.)

 

Oh. I never thought about it this way. Thanks for the info

 

The truth of the matter is that several of our mainstream programs were founded on less than a dozen individuals. I can even think of a few cases were entire international programs has less than five founders between them.

~Thylo

 

Different species also seem to be impacted by inbreeding differently; within the ungulate family alone, I know of a couple species that are highly inbred while showing little to no negative impacts while a very significant effect from even low levels of inbreeding has been demonstrated in another species - so yes, as @Echobeast rightly said, genetics can be a little complicated