Ups and downs for the stress-prone sitatunga

Press, 16 April 1986, Page 22

Ups and downs for the stress-prone sitatunga

Sitatungas, members of the antelope family, are the type of endangered species over which their keepers “sweat blood.** Elation and disappointment follow each other, but co-operation between zoo parks on breeding and care has raised hopes of saving this endangered species. TESSA WARD continues “The Press’* series of articles.

Good captive breeding conditions for endangered species are not always a guarantee that they will make it to adulthood and take the species a step closer to an assured survival. Orana Park staff have had their share of disappointment and frustration with their sitatunga (Tragelaphuss speki), small, hardy, but stress-prone members of the antelope family. With only a small captive population of sitatunga throughout the world, their genetic constitution has weakened over the years and brought unexpected breeding difficulties, the park director, Paul Garland, says. Orana Park’s first sitatunga pair, Golden Girl and David, arrived in 1981 from Wellington Zoo while Golden Girl was pregnant. Although her calf, Paul, survived for a year, he died from the stress of being moved to Melbourne Zoo to boost the sitatunga population there. More disappointment followed with a still-born calf, but the next calf, Amber, provided welcome encouragement for park staff. Although she did not suckle from her mother, she was successfully hand-reared on a special formula.

The sitatunga prospects at Orana Park improved with the arrival of another calf, Honey, but the death of David in 1981, due to a malignant catarrah fever, added to the set-backs.

An Australasian species management programme, co-ordinat-ing the efforts of all the Australian and New Zealand zoos to breed sitatunga, becomes particularly important in the face of such disappointment. When the need arises, the Australasian programme, with five male and 17 female sitatunga, is given a boost by other zoos and vice versa. Together, the world’s zoos contain about 250 sitatunga and in the wild there are only a few thousand left.

introduction of unwanted disease the Australasian zoos receive sitatunga only from United Kingdom zoos. “This limits our choices and is further complicated by the clearance required for endangered species freighting in accordance with rules of The Convention in International trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (C.1.T.E.5.). “We are hopeful that we will be able to share a male sitatunga with Wellington Zoo, which is one of three males from England at present in Australasian quarantine. Breeding is likely to

begin again when we mix this male with our three females and the five females at Wellington Zoo.” Orana Park’s sitatunga do well on lucerne hay, ruminant pellets, and fruit even though this is a far cry from their wild habitat diet of aquatic plants, bamboo shoots, and papyrus. The sitatungas’ natural habitats are the marshes, forest swamps, and reed jungles of the Victoria, Congo, and Zambezi-Okavango river systems in Africa. While they are able to quickly hide by submerging in water up to their nostrils, they are still vulnerable

Orana Park’s director, Paul Garland, says that to prevent the

to hunters who flush them out , from the riverbanks and catch <• them while they are swimming. . Human destruction of the sita- . tungas’ habitat presents the greatest threat to their survival, , Mr Garland says. A peculiar evolutionary feature of the striped and spotted < sitatunga is its wide-spreading hoof, allowing safe passage over , muddy ground but giving clumsy movement on dry grounds. , Under threat, the shy sitatunga « will fight — the male by going down on its elbows and pushing forward and the female by boxing with the head and biting.