Fertility assessment of cheetah males with poor quality semen

Abstract

Reports on semen quality of the cheetah (Acinonyx jubutus) indicate that high percentages of abnormal morphs and sperm concentrations, 10 times lower than in domestic cats, are found in all populations. These characteristics are believed to result from unusual genetic homozygosity , hypothesized to have been caused by passage of the species through one or more population bottlenecks during its recent history. In a sample of 12 captive-living males, we found semen characteristics to be equal or inferior to those previously reported for males living in other captive facilities. Ten of these males (83.3%) nevertheless produced pregnancies. Seventeen of 19 pregnancies resulted from matings during a single estrus. This examination of the reproductive potential of males having comparatively inferior ejaculate quality supports the suggestion that husbandry programs may be more significant than physiological impairment in causing the low birth rates of captive cheetahs. These results also have implications for ascertaining fertility thresholds in mammalian populations undergoing increased levels of inbreeding as a consequence of habitat deterioration. 0 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Food Habits of the Leopard Cat (Prionailurus bengalensis euptilurus) in Korea

“…1993. Finally, some captive males are very fertile and others essentially infertile, despite having similar levels of poor quality sperrn (Donoghue et al 1992, Lindburg et al 1993, Wildt et al 1993a.…”

“…However, while moderate levels of variation have accumulated in non-coding genetic material, it would theoretically take "millions of years" to restore similar levels of coding DNA heterozygosity for a species as depauperate in variation as the cheetah (Menotti- Raymond and O'Brien 1993). Problems symptomatic of inbreeding depression have been found in the global captive population, such as low levels of conception and elevated cub mortality (Marker and O'Brien 1989), but the outstanding reproductive successes achieved by some institutions indicate that inappropriate management is at least partly responsible (Lindburg et al 1993, Marker-Kraus and Grisham 1993, Wildt et al 1993. Similar evidence of poor reproduction has not been found in the intensively studied wild population in the Serengeti (Laurenson et al 1992), despite Serengeti males having high levels of abnormal sperm (Wildt et al 1987a).…”

“…Developing guidelines to improve reproductive performance in cheetahs has been the subject of a good deal of focused research as well as wide-ranging surveys over the past few years (Grisham 1988, Lee 1992, McKeown 1992, Lindburg et al 1993, N. Wielebnowski in prep., S. Wells in prep., J. Grisham in prep. ), including a major effort by the Cheetah Species Survival Plan to assess the reproductive status of 128 captive cheetahs in North America (Wildt et al 1993a).…”

Ejaculate traits in the Namibian cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus): influence of age, season and captivity

“…The result has been reduced cheetah home-range size and population fragmentation (Marker-Kraus et al 1996). The worldwide ex situ population of cheetahs is composed of ~ 1350 individuals (Marker 2002), which generally reproduce poorly in captivity (Lindburg et al 1993;Marker-Kraus and Grisham 1993). In contrast, cheetahs living in the Serengeti ecosystem appear to reproduce efficiently in the absence of human perturbations (Caro 1994).…”

Cheetah conservation in South Africa

“…Numerous diseases and health problems have been recorded in cheetahs Lobetti et al, 1998;Terio et al, 1998;Picard et al, 1998;Phillips, 1993;Phillips et al, 1993;Peirce et al, 1995;Heeney et al, 1990;Brown et al, 1993;Boomker and Henton, 1980;Bond and Lindburg, 1990;Keet et al, 1997). 40 However, the three most common diseases in captivity have not been recorded in the wild nor have many of the others.…”