New Life For A Vanished Zebra? - efforts to breed the 'extinct' quagga zebra in South Africa

South African taxidermist Reinhold Rau is laboring to breed back the extinct quagga, but what exactly does that mean?

AT THE FOOT of Table Mountain, where tall grasses bake brown in the South African summer sun, Reinhold Rau dumps a box full of fresh green lawn clippings onto the ground and backs away. A trio of unusually colored zebras approaches cautiously for a nibble, while another stallion trots straight for the white-bearded visitor. "Paul, you naughty bugger," he shouts, rushing into the cab of his pickup and cranking up the window. "He just wants to be cuddled," explains Rau, "but he doesn't know his own strength."

The zebra has good reason to feel such affection for his nervous friend. Five years before, Rau had found young Paul, only a few hours old, wandering aimlessly among the herd. Nearby, his mother lay dead, presumably gored by an eland bull. Rau immediately ordered a special formula to feed the newborn foal and helped capture the orphan. But Paul had little chance of surviving unless he could absorb the disease- fighting antibodies from his mother's colostrum milk within a few hours. So Rau knelt before the bloodied

mare and called upon milking skills learned during childhood visits to his grandfather's farm in Germany. "I saved every drop I could get," he recalls.

It was an extraordinary effort, but this was no ordinary foal. His creamy legs, his scantily striped rump and the cafe au lait color of his body gave Rau hope that the Quagga Breeding Project he had founded five years before was progressing toward its ambitious and controversial goal: the revival of the extinct quagga. It is a goal that makes some conservationists cheer and others cringe, raising questions about whether an animal can ever be bred back from extinction.

When Europeans first landed at the Cape of Good Hope, three centuries ago, the semiarid Karoo plains teemed with thousands of "wild asses," as the Dutch settlers called them. Dark brown stripes marked the head and neck of this strange creature, fading away as they progressed across its chestnut shoulders and back. The off-white legs were completely naked of stripes. Soon the newcomers adopted the name quagga--an imitation of the equid's barklike call--from the local Khoi language.

A few pioneers managed to tame quaggas to pull wagons, but mostly the wild grazers were looked upon as pests, devouring grass needed for sheep. Shooting parties would slaughter hundreds of the half-striped zebras in a day. In 1886, when the Cape governor banned quagga hunting, he was too late. The last quagga had died in the Amsterdam Zoo three years before.

Four decades ago, when Rau first arrived in South Africa, the quagga's story ended there. Barring a Jurassic Park miracle, any extinct species is lost forever. And apart from a coterie of German scientists, most specialists in the Equidae family of zebras and horses did count the quagga as a separate species. Over the next 26 years, Rau would turn their ideas upside down.

When does a plains zebra.... ....become a quagga?

A taxidermist by profession, Rau first took an interest in the quagga when the South African Museum of Cape Town lured him from his native Germany. Rau was moved when he first beheld the museum's moth-eaten quagga foal, stuffed with straw. "I felt sorry for it," he says. "Naturally, if one deals with an animal that is extinct, one pays attention." Ten years later, Rau had built up the experience and the courage to remount the delicate foal.

Rau had heard that a debate was raging among scientists over whether to count the quagga as a subspecies of the plains zebras or as a species of its own. One researcher even claimed that the quagga was more akin to the horse than to any of the three zebra species. Rau avoided the argument at the time. "I'm a taxidermist, not a taxonomist," he quips.

Nonetheless, his curiosity was piqued, and he crisscrossed Europe to examine almost all of the world's 23 preserved quaggas. What he saw convinced him to enter the fray. Rau already knew that the living populations of the plains zebra vary widely. In Kenya they are boldly striped from ear to hoof, while the southern subspecies has muted gray- brown shadow stripes and lightly striped legs. Now he observed that the most heavily striped quaggas differed little from the least-striped plains zebras in South Africa. "I found it hard to believe they were different species," he says.

He soon began publishing his opinion. It was a bold effort for someone with no university degree. But his plan was even bolder: to rebreed the extinct quagga from existing plains zebras.

Since two different subspecies of the same animal can mate to produce fertile offspring, Rau figured that quaggas had probably mixed their blood with neighboring plains zebras. In the words of Dr. Eric Harley, a molecular biologist at the University of Cape Town and a member of the quagga project committee, "it is perfectly feasible that the genes which characterized the quagga are themselves not really extinct. They are still there, but rather diluted out and dominated by the genes of the plains zebra. We aim to retrieve those genes."

In 1975, Rau began his great experiment, sending letters to some of South Africa's leading zoologists and conservationists to outline his plan. Most, Rau believes, took one look at the letter and came to the same conclusion: "'This is all nonsense. How can you rebreed an extinct animal? And how dare somebody with no university education even involve himself in such discussions?'" Discouraged, but not dissuaded, Rau spent the next decade quietly gathering supporters. "He's like a bull terrier," says Hennie Heidenreich, a member of the project committee. "Once they've grabbed hold, they don't let go."

To quiet the naysayers, Rau needed proof that the plains zebra and quagga were indeed kissing cousins. In 1980, that suddenly became possible. Rau had taken leave from his job to remount three quaggas at a German museum. While there, he received a letter from Oliver Ryder, a specialist in equid genetics at the San Diego Zoo. Ryder was looking for zebra tissues to study. Rau offered him something much better: dried quagga flesh that he had recently sliced off a poorly prepared skin.

Ryder couldn't believe the quality of the century-old samples that arrived at his office. "It looked like jerky, almost," he marvels. In another stroke of luck, Ryder discovered that a biochemist with the University of California at Berkeley, Russell Higuchi, was eager to work with ancient DNA. In 1983, Higuchi made history when he became the first scientist to extract and clone a DNA segment from an extinct animal. This tiny fragment of the quagga's genetic code differed from horse genes in 12 locations, and from mountain zebra DNA in 10 places. Between the plains zebra and the quagga, however, there was not a single meaningful difference. So the quagga was the southernmost subspecies of the plains zebra. "The DNA evidence closes the case," observes Colin Groves, an equid taxonomy expert at the Australian National University.

A handful of holdouts still insists that the quagga could be a separate species. Few scientists will question the taxidermist's credentials today, however. "He's really responsible for discovering just about everything we know about quaggas in modern times," says Groves.

Finally, in March of 1986, Rau and a committee with expertise from the fields of zoology, livestock breeding, veterinary medicine, genetics and conservation launched the Quagga Breeding Project. Within months, Rau had traveled to Etosha National Park in neighboring Namibia. He inspected some 2,500 zebras over four days to select the nine brownest and barest animals. Later, he chose lightly striped breeding stock from South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province.

Today, progress is visible among the project's 56 animals, kept at five different sites. "Those animals in the green pines really look brown," says Rau, watching some mares on Table Mountain. "It's beautiful." In other herds, the project has bred zebras with pure white legs and almost stripeless rumps.

Back in his cluttered office at the museum, Rau points to a poster that he has assembled from 24 photographs of stuffed quaggas, arranged in six rows from least striped at the top to most striped at the bottom. He brags that the project's best animals already match the quaggas on the bottom row.

Yet the black-and-white photographs hide a frustration in the breeding program. "It hasn't happened yet that we get the lovely brown color of one individual and the much reduced striping of another together in one foal," Rau admits. "We've got to have a lot of patience." Stallions take up to five years to reach breeding age. The first foal of the second generation was born only last year.

Heidenreich, a retired professor of animal husbandry, estimates that it will take 30 more years to reach the top row on that poster. "Some of us won't be living that long," he laments. Most troubling to committee members is that Rau, age 67, might be one of them. "A man that committed is not easy to find," worries Willie Smith, an animal nutritionist who recalls many 5 am telephone calls from Rau, fretting about an ailing zebra.

Rau does not insist on a top-row quagga, however. "If we get a foal one day that fits in the middle of this poster, then I would be happy to call that a quagga. That genuine quagga could be born any moment, but it might also take 20 or 30 years. It might also never happen; we don't know."

Many scientists are not as concerned about the wait as they are about Rau's name for the resulting animal. "Quaggas are extinct," asserts Ryder of the San Diego Zoo. "There's a difference between producing animals that have the appearance of the quagga and actually resurrecting quaggas." Ryder and others believe that the quagga may have evolved other genetic adaptations to the dry Karoo that will never be reassembled through selective breeding. "It's much like taking the New York phone book, cutting it all into pieces, casting it into the wind and saying, 'now we're going to put it back together.'"

"We blow that argument to the wind," counters Rau, referring to the alleged adaptations. He notes that the grasses of the Karoo are virtually the same as those to the immediate northeast, only sparser, and that recently introduced plains zebras thrive on game farms in the region. He also emphasizes that the quagga was named and described scientifically on the basis of appearance alone. "The quagga is a quagga because of the way that it looked, and if you produce animals that look that way then they are quaggas. Finished," he declares.

While many South African conservationists line up on Rau's side, some fear that an ill-considered name for this animal might weaken the fight to save others. "If you say it is a quagga, people might allow extinctions, saying, 'we can recreate that later,'" warns Peter Lloyd, chief conservation scientist for the Western Cape province. Project committee members attempt to address the concern by stressing that they are "retrieving" rather than "re-creating" the quagga, and by emphasizing that selective breeding is useless in the case of an extinct species.

By whatever name it is called, Rau has a clear picture of where he would like to see his living legacy. On his office wall, to the left of the poster, is a framed photograph of the Karoo landscape that Rau has doctored by pasting on quaggas. The collage is nearing reality. Last year, the first animals from the project were moved from the mountainous Cape coast to the Karoo National Park. Their arrival may have been premature, but the national park's leaders harbor no illusion that they can show visitors a virgin tableau. The extinct Cape lion subspecies is missing. And grazing populations are kept artificially low to help revive grasses once decimated by livestock. Created in 1979 from sheep pastures, the park is part of a broad yet belated effort to compensate for 300 years of devastation in a biome larger than California.

Given the vital importance of restoring the Karoo to its lost past, however imperfectly, the debate over what to call Rau's creation fades in significance. Rather than blinding the public to the tragedy of extinction, a new quagga could in fact open their eyes to the value of an entire ecosystem. The last, best hope for the fragile Karoo may be that one day it will be known as the place where the quagga was exterminated, only to rise again.

A former Africa correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, Don Boroughs lives in Johannesburg. He currently free-lances as a writer and photographer on topics ranging from the environment to economics.

"The quagga is a quagga because of the way that it looked, and if you produce animals that look that way, then they are quaggas. Finished."

Reinhold Rau

Why Zebras Have Stripes

Ever the artist, taxidermist Rau adds stripes to quagga figurines (above), but the purpose of stripes on real zebras remains a mystery.

Old theories that the pattern provides camouflage or bewilders predators are falling out of favor: Zebras make no effort to hide, and lions have no particular problem catching them.

An insect explanation doesn't work either. Entomologist Gabriella Gibson says a tsetse fly is 53 times more likely to land on a black target than one with zebra stripes. But zebras are largely immune to tsetses, so why evolve an elaborate fly screen?

Could the answer emanate from the zebras' unique, tightly knit harems? Hans Klingel, an authority on zebra behavior, argues that stripes act as name tags. Jonathan Kingdon, author of the Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals, suggests that zebras learn to associate stripes with the pleasure from a mother's grooming, reinforcing social solidarity. "They get a high from looking at stripes," he says.

Or they may just get a kick out of keeping the secret to themselves.-- D.B.

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Wildlife Federation
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