The 'extinct' antelope bringing hope in the Sahara Desert
38 minutes ago
Matthew Ponsford
Sahara Conservation
The scimitar-horned oryx has been brought back from extinction through captive breeding. Conservationists hope it could help slow the spread of the Sahara Desert.
When Marie Petretto and John Newby arrived in central Chad in the spring of 2012, they'd been sent with a mission to see this wide, open landscape as an antelope might see it.
The Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve, a protected area on the edge of the Sahara, is bigger than the Republic of Ireland, with vast expanses of sun-baked drylands. New arrivals usually assume "it's just desert", says Petretto, a biologist and wildlife veterinarian, but as they moved through, their team of ecologists and conservationists documented its vast ranges of Sahelian grasslands and wooded gorges. "At first the desert and arid lands seem very flat and homogeneous," she says. "Once you start exploring, you realise how incredibly varied they are."
Petretto recalls close to 100 gazelles bounding past their truck and finding sparse clusters of acacia, some filled with vultures. Though ominous, these trees operate like "umbrellas on the beach", she says, allowing wildlife to rest in a landscape that can reach 50C (122F). River valleys, known as wadis, burst into life during dramatic seasonal rains around July, and hold onto this humidity through drier months, when they support food plants, such as wild bitter melon, and small shrubs where animals can hide.
All these signs gave them confidence that this could be the place for an audacious experiment to bring back a species that had vanished entirely from the wild in the 1980s. While the hottest months in Ouadi Achim would be deadly for most animals, the environment was ready-made for the scimitar-horned oryx, an antelope that stands more than 1m (3.3ft) tall at the shoulder, and is named for its long, elegant horns that reach backwards over its body like a curved sword.
The oryx has evolved to live healthily around the edges of Sahara – able to survive for months without water – but, by 2012, it lived only in zoos and reserves scattered across the planet. If successful, their plan to release the oryx would make it just the sixth-ever large mammal to have been declared extinct in the wild then to have been brought back via captive breeding, following the Przewalski's horse, European Bison, red wolf, Père David's deer and the Arabian oryx.
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The species had vanished from the wild in the 1980s, but scientists hoped they could reintroduce it (Credit: Sahara Conservation)
More:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251202-the-extinct-antelope-bringing-hope-in-the-sahara-desert
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(You have to put on your cowboy hat and boots before reading this wretched rot.)
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