Though it may seem bizarre for a female bird to have male chicks on her own, sex in birds and people isn’t determined the same way. Ryder and colleagues reported their results in the Journal of Heredity, the official publication of the century-old American Genetic Assn. “I still get a chill and goose bumps when I tell that story.” “I said, ‘You’ve just shown that there’s parthenogenetic development in California condors,’” Ryder recalls. What was also odd, she added, was that while each condor had two DNA copies at each site, those copies were all identical.ĭid the birds inherit only maternal copies, he asked? As they did, she explained that two condors born in captivity didn’t seem to have genetic material from their fathers at any of the 21 different DNA regions Chemnick checked (and double-checked). Ryder, who was leaving the office, asked Chemnick to walk and talk as he headed to his car. Oliver Ryder she needed to talk with him about some puzzling findings.
That all changed when Leona Chemnick, who was then a researcher at the zoo’s institute for conservation research, told director of genetics Dr. Researchers didn’t expect any major surprises when they began testing samples from more than 900 condors around 2013. The DNA in these samples can reveal how closely two condors are related and how traits are passed down from one generation to the next. Throughout this ongoing effort, researchers have collected a vast repository of condor blood, feathers and tissue. A captive breeding program run out of the Safari Park has accounted for much of that rebound, and the zoo and Safari Park have hatched more than 160 condors over the years. By the end of 2019, that count rose to 525, with 306 condors flying freely across California, Arizona, Utah and Baja California. On Easter Sunday 1987, the last known wild California condor was captured 40 miles southwest of Bakersfield He was taken to what is now called the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, to be put in a captive-breeding program.īy 1982, there were only 22 of the iconic birds left. From the Archives: Last California Condor in the wild was captured in 1987
0 kommentar(er)
