posted on Sep, 2 2004 @ 09:20 PM
Oh my. If you only knew what was running through my mind when I read that topic.
Getting endangered animals to breed in captivity is a noble effort, but I wish we could just restore their original habitats.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, near where I live, a few years ago they figured out how to get some kind of huge endangered turtle to reproduce. Turns out that
when they were in captivity, they nearly always kept all of the turtles together (male and female) while in the wild, the different genders remained
in seperate groups except during mating season. They applied that simple solution and it just happened to work. They just got sick of each other or
perhaps the sibling effect had something to do with it.
I think the problem was that the zookeepers were too busy thinking about keeping them alive and in a like environment to observe how their social
groups worked.