Long legged, retractable claws, sleek with a tan coat and black spots, exotic, fastest land animal on earth, muscular, sharp sprints of speed and surprisingly docile, the Cheetah has stirred human imagination for millennium. One hundred years ago there were 100,000 of these magnificent animals today less than 10,000 remain in the wild. Historically cheetahs were found throughout Africa and Asia from South Africa to India. They are now confined to parts of eastern, central and southwestern Africa and a small portion of Iran. The cheetah hunts by knocking their prey to the ground and than suffocating it with a vice like bite to the neck.
Like most species on this planet, rapidly accelerating Holocene epoch or 6th mass extinction events have become a grim reality. We may be looking at the end time for the cheetah (at least in the wild).
A new study from Queen's University Belfast into how cheetahs burn energy suggests that human activity rather then lions or hyenas killing Cheetah offspring is responsible for their frightening decline.
Humans to Blame for Cheetah Decline
After capturing the cheetahs, the researchers put radio collars on the cats and injected them with isotope-laden water (an isotope is a variation of an element). They followed each cheetah for two weeks, and recorded the cats' behaviors, such as lying, sitting, walking and chasing prey. The team also analyzed the rate at which the cats excreted the isotopes in their poop, which allowed the researchers to calculate how much energy the cheetahs used in their daily activities, such as catching prey.
Surprisingly, the cats spent most of their energy walking long distances to find prey, they found. Habitat loss and human involvement, such as putting up fences or barriers, both contributed to the extended walking, the researchers said.
"What our study showed was that their major energy costs seem to be incurred by travelling, rather than securing prey," Scantlebury said in a statement. "If you can imagine walking up and down sand dunes in high temperatures day in, day out, with no water to drink, you start to get a feel for how challenging these cats' daily lives are, and yet they remain remarkably adapted and resilient."
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"Imagine how hard it must be for a small cub to follow its mother farther and farther through the desert to look for food, while she herself is fighting for survival," said John Wilson, who worked on the project while completing his doctoral degree at North Carolina State University.
Kenyan researchers with the
National Museum of Kenya and the
Kenya Wildlife Service have discovered that warmer temperatures are affecting the cheetahs ability to reproduce along with it's feeding habits.
Cheetah struggling to reproduce due to climate change, scientists warn
Risky Agwanda, head of mammology section at NMK, said: "Climate change has contributed to defects of the cheetah sperm. Many have abnormal coils, low sperm counts, as well as extremely low testosterone levels. Change in climate has made the survival of the gazelle difficult to survive and as a result, the cheetah has had to switch to other diets, also affecting its ability to reproduce effectively.".
He added that the animal, that can accelerate from 0-100kph in three seconds, has a sperm count 10 times lower than the domestic cat.
"Cheetahs love to prey on Thomson's gazelles, they have a very high protein content compared to other herbivores and the population of the gazelle has been on a rapid decline due to poor climate conditions and human activities.
"We have studied a large number of the cheetahs. As a result, it preys on other herbivores such as the zebra which do not have a high nutritional content. We discovered that the gazelle diet can actually help maintain the good health of the cheetah sperm if the animal has not yet been negatively affected by poor climate," explained Agwanda.
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As gazelle numbers continue to decrease due to drought, conservation efforts of the cheetah could be badly affected. The gazelles are also crossbreeding with other herbivores, reducing their protein content further, Agwanda said.
Scientists have never discovered any reproductive health deficiencies in other big cats, which they say can adapt more to climate change compared to the cheetah.
"The genetic make-up of the animal is more sensitive as compared to the other big cats. The cheetahs have weak genes," said Agwanda.
The Cheetah as a highly prized and lucrative exotic pet.
National Geographic notes that if you type cheetah and images into Google more then 20 millions hits come back from fashion shoots to flashy car ads to photos of pet cheetahs riding in the backseats of Mercedes convertibles.
Egyptians were the first people to tame them as pets and immortalize them in images on tombs and temples, nearly 4,000 years ago. In India, Iran, and Arabia, coursing with cheetahs—or “hunting leopards,” as they were known—became an immensely popular sport among the aristocracy. In the courts of the Mogul emperors, cheetahs became a kind of motif, celebrated in paintings and tapestries, folklore and verse. Favorite cheetahs were adorned with jeweled collars and featured prominently in royal processions.
Cheetahs remain highly fashionable in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, where a cub can fetch upwards of $10,000. “A rich, young man buys himself a cheetah to go with his sports car,” says Mordecai Ogada, a Kenyan wildlife biologist who has studied cheetah-human relationships and wildlife trafficking. “It’s typically a new-money thing nowadays.”
In places such as the United Arab Emirates cheetahs occupy a kind of legal limbo. “The importation is clandestine,” says Ogada, “but once there, the trade is open. Trafficked cheetahs can easily be ‘laundered’ and made to appear as though they were legally bred in captivity. It’s difficult to determine the source of cubs unless you do genetic analysis and identify them as members of a subspecies that’s endemic to a particular area.”
How great a toll trafficking is taking on the world’s dwindling cheetah population is anyone’s guess, but evidence suggests that trade in wild cheetah cubs is a large-scale enterprise. Even a cursory trawl of the Internet turns up plenty of cubs being offered for sale by “breeders” in places like Dubai. Several cheetah smugglers were arrested last year in Tanzania and Kenya, and there were rumors of cheetah cubs being offered for sale as far afield as Cameroon.
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They’ll never be able to return to the wild,” says Ogada. “Even if you could teach them to hunt, humans can’t teach cubs how to recognize and avoid predators such as lions and hyenas.” And although some cheetahs have been successfully rewilded on large, fenced reserves in South Africa, the wide-open grasslands are a far more dangerous place to grow up. Orphaned cubs “wouldn’t stand a chance in a place like the Serengeti,” says Ogada.
Even mother cheetahs find it difficult to raise cubs in the wild, where mortality among cubs can run as high as 95 percent. The great majority of cubs may never make it out of the den in which they’re born. They’re killed in raids by lions or hyenas, or they die of exposure, or they’re abandoned by mothers that aren’t skillful enough hunters to support them. Indeed, many female cheetahs go their entire lives without raising a single cub to maturity.
This clip shows every tendon, muscle and hair on a slowed down version of a Cheetah sprint. Warning may be addictive to watch.