Subspecies held in the USA, for ZTL

So now we have Hawk Creek, a facility that is known for being secretive, saying these cats came from Sudan, and someone on ZTL saying they're from Chad, with Hawk Creek claiming their offspring are at a number of different zoos when the SSP is supposed to not include the African subspecies? I'm not aware of any other non-AZA sand cat holders (@TinoPup are you aware of any?) but could that be where they ended up? I'm beginning to think there are enough inconsistencies that the entire population might be best placed as "subspecies uncertain".

Sand cats are appearing outside of AZA, yes; I don't know if they're all from Hawk Creek or are also being imported by others. Places like Camel Safari in Nevada, Debbie Dolittle's Animal Experience in Washington, and Big Red's Barn in Idaho hold/recently held the species, to give you an idea.

Hawk Creek used to have a lot more information on their website about their importing of sand cats than they do now.
 
I see Brookfield and Erie are both currently listed as having the nominate subspecies of Common Raven, which seems unlikely given that's a Eurasian subspecies. Are there actually Eurasian ravens in US zoos, or is this (as I assume) someone who entered a subspecies without knowing what they were doing?
 
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Are there actually Eurasian ravens in US zoos, or is this (as I assume) someone who entered a subspecies without knowing what they were doing?

I would suspect it is indeed erroneous, particularly as neither is a bird specialist facility. You'd probably have to email the zoos themselves to ascertain origin.
 
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What about Andean Cock-of-the-Rock? I assume their import location is known, given they're a relatively recent arrival in the US? I notice two different subspecies have ZTL listings in the US right now (plus some as generic). Are there actually two different lineages?
 
What about Andean Cock-of-the-Rock? I assume their import location is known, given they're a relatively recent arrival in the US? I notice two different subspecies have ZTL listings in the US right now (plus some as generic). Are there actually two different lineages?

Both peruvianus and sanguinolentus are indeed present. I'm not sure who has what other than DWA having both last I was aware (as they've been the main importer and breeder.) Possible there may be a couple ssp hybrids but again I'm not sure. There are visible differences in the eye color, but I'm not remembering the details currently. Peruvianus is typically observed to be a deeper red, with sanguinolentus leaning towards more orange-red; however this seems to vary a decent bit and I wouldn't rely on it for ID purposes.
 
Both peruvianus and sanguinolentus are indeed present. I'm not sure who has what other than DWA having both last I was aware (as they've been the main importer and breeder.) Possible there may be a couple ssp hybrids but again I'm not sure. There are visible differences in the eye color, but I'm not remembering the details currently. Peruvianus is typically observed to be a deeper red, with sanguinolentus leaning towards more orange-red; however this seems to vary a decent bit and I wouldn't rely on it for ID purposes.

Should we take this to mean that a lot of the current US entries for Andean Cock-of-the-Rock are incorrect or unverified then? Lots of entries have been made under one subspecies or the other, with no explanation for any of them as to how that ID was determined.
 
Should we take this to mean that a lot of the current US entries for Andean Cock-of-the-Rock are incorrect or unverified then? Lots of entries have been made under one subspecies or the other, with no explanation for any of them as to how that ID was determined.

Yeah probably, as per typical of the NA side of ZTL.
 
@Animal: any update on getting all of the giraffe holdings switched to generic? I noticed that despite this conversation ending, they still are all incorrectly listed as subspecific in ZTL.

A good chunk of the holdings were already entered as generic, and were merely duplicated when added as subspecific at that.


I'd still appreciate an answer in regards to my earlier post @Animal

@Animal There's something I would like some clarification on please.

We have been explicitly told that if we are even strongly suspected of using ZIMS as a source of information it's a non-negotiable ban, including that subspecies listings are often wrong:




So then I'm curious why you're arguing against all of us, using a source that is both widely known to be outdated and wrong, and when if any of us used your source we'd be banned from ZTL...







That comes across very hypocritical and confusing. It also feels like not all the ZTL admins aren't on the same page with the issue.
 
@Animal: any update on getting all of the giraffe holdings switched to generic? I noticed that despite this conversation ending, they still are all incorrectly listed as subspecific in ZTL.

I got today an answer from the studbook keeper. Massai are all pure and the rest population is managed as a hybrid population BUT there are likely still pure ones in that population.

So: We will enter them as generic, but a bit of detective work can help to still list the pure ones as pure.
 
So: We will enter them as generic, but a bit of detective work can help to still list the pure ones as pure.

Eh? @Neil chace has already done the "detective work" for us. They literally wrote up this beautiful post on the subject.

Since it is clear you won't taken anything less as proof, despite the numerous other sources given by myself and others, I put way too much work into this today to finally put this issue to rest.

For starters, the most recent generic giraffe SSP plan contains a graph showing each founder of the population, a total of 96 founders. With this information, I used CTRL+F to find each of the 96 founders as quickly as possible in the 2011 studbook you provided. Out of 96 founders, 87 of them are listed as subspecies "ret/roth". Unfortunately, each of these 87 founders had their location of origin listed as either Kenya or East Africa, and given that multiple species of giraffe live in each of these locations, it would be impossible using the studbook to determine the actual identity of any of these individuals.

That leaves us with a total of nine individuals that are not listed as "ret/roth" to analyze the descendants of. Out of these nine individuals, one of them (SB#409) is listed as a "hybrid" and one of them (SB#206) is listed as tippelskirchi. Since the Masai giraffe population is managed separately and isn't part of the genetic question, that individual would not provide any additionally helpful insight to this study.

Of the seven individuals remaining, three (sub)species of giraffe are represented: reticulata (SB# 207, 474), camelopardalis (95, 96), and rothschildi (5-336, 5-339, 5-337). With this information in hand, I will now go through each of these individuals to determine if any had offspring together that would be of known pure subspecies.

Reticulata
Two individuals were listed as subspecies reticulata. One of them was a male giraffe who lived at the Dallas Zoo from 1956-1978, and the other was a female giraffe who lived at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo from 1968-1995. Given that there were no offspring between these two individuals, there are no individuals based on the information available that can be proven as pure reticulated giraffes.

Camelopardalis
These two individuals, 95 and 96, were both imported from Sudan to the National Zoo in 1937, where they lived until their deaths in the late 1950's. There were offspring from this pair, including a daughter who was back-bred with the father. However, the last individual in the studbook I could find who was descended purely from these two founders was a female that died at the Honolulu Zoo in 1985. Given that all the other founders were listed as "retic/roth", it is all but a certainty there are no purebred giraffes of this species in US zoos, although some of this species' genes are still floating around in the generic population.

Rothschildi
These three founders (5-3336, 5-3339, and 5-3337) were the parents to three giraffes imported from Woburn, England to the African Lion Safari in Canada in the 1973. This trio of giraffes had three offspring. Two of them were later exported to a zoo in New Zealand, while the third went to Zoo Granby, where she lived until 2005. There are no individuals left alive descended purely from these three founders.

Basically, your idea that we can find purebred individuals in the 2011 studbook is completely false. Unless you or anyone has information on any of the 87 founders listed as "ret/roth", then the closest I can get is that the last confirmed purebred Northern giraffe died in 1985, the last confirmed purebred reticulated giraffe died in 1995, and the last confirmed purebred Rothschild's giraffe died in 2005. I see no reasonable way to not believe those of us stating there aren't purebred individuals in US zoos, and that they should all be changed to generic in ZTL.

I'm baffled as to what more you could want. What research @Neil chace has done seems quite definite!

The studbook keeper is most likely mistaken, they're only human after all and probably don't have enough time in the day to do extensive research like an euthanist does.
 
I'm baffled as to what more you could want. What research @Neil chace has done seems quite definite!

The studbook keeper is most likely mistaken, they're only human after all and probably don't have enough time in the day to do extensive research like an euthanist does.
To be fair, "likely still pure ones left" does not mean there are a lot of pure ones left. While I don't think it'd be possible to figure out which ones, especially if the studbook keeper didn't provide any information into which ones are pure, it doesn't seem unreasonable that there might be an extremely small number of giraffes left that are pure, so I doubt the studbook keeper is mistaken, as getting a job like that tends to mean they're one of the leading experts in a particular species in the entire AZA.
 
So: We will enter them as generic, but a bit of detective work can help to still list the pure ones as pure.

Have fun with that endeavor - we have no way of figuring that out with the resources available to us. I would also like to note the studbooks for over a decade have not identified any pure Retics/Roths, so the studbook keeper stating there might be pure ones left seems more akin to a guess to me.
 
So: We will enter them as generic, but a bit of detective work can help to still list the pure ones as pure.
What Neil said in his is about as much detective work we can get as possible because there are just too few sources on the internet to find complete information about every animal, so I don't think we can get much more information anyways. The studbook keeper is not a genie, so there is bound to be some guesses and errors on here.
 
How confident are folks that the Red-Fronted Lemurs (Eulemur rufifrons) in the US are genuinely that species? The director of San Francisco Zoo told me that he was fairly confident theirs was indeed the species. ZTL rather uniquely has the page "Eulemur rufus (in part rufifrons)."

ZootierlisteHomepage
 
How confident are folks that the Red-Fronted Lemurs (Eulemur rufifrons) in the US are genuinely that species? The director of San Francisco Zoo told me that he was fairly confident theirs was indeed the species. ZTL rather uniquely has the page "Eulemur rufus (in part rufifrons)."

ZootierlisteHomepage

I don't know about the AZA population, but outside the AZA there's definitely hybrids. They're usually labelled as something like "brown lemur", sometimes red-fronted.
 
Some may not even be native - wolverines being of European origin, for example.

Do we know if all wolverines in the US (or more specifically, all of those in AZA) are the European subspecies? Or are some also the North American?

The animals I'm trying to search for are the ones held at San Francisco Zoo. I have their signage from 2022 but it just says Gulo gulo (no subspecies). It does say that they're part of the SSP though, if that helps.

Then I've found some news sources saying that SF's newest wolverines (dated 2023) come from Zoo Montana (SF Zoo Will Soon Display Endangered (and Iconic) Mammal), and then have a news source saying that Zoo Montana's originally came from Finland and Sweden (https://www.ktvq.com/news/local-new...-zoomontanas-wolverine-kits-a-win-for-species), which makes me think they're the European subspecies. But both articles are a little tricky because they also throw in information about how rare the North American subspecies is, which makes them a little unclear.

(And of course, the articles are from 2023, which means theoretically the 2022 signs and the 2023 additions may not be the same -- although I'd assume they'd want them to be??).

So if there's a mix of both subspecies out there, I may need to wait before entering these.
 
Do we know if all wolverines in the US (or more specifically, all of those in AZA) are the European subspecies? Or are some also the North American?

The animals I'm trying to search for are the ones held at San Francisco Zoo. I have their signage from 2022 but it just says Gulo gulo (no subspecies). It does say that they're part of the SSP though, if that helps.

Then I've found some news sources saying that SF's newest wolverines (dated 2023) come from Zoo Montana (SF Zoo Will Soon Display Endangered (and Iconic) Mammal), and then have a news source saying that Zoo Montana's originally came from Finland and Sweden (https://www.ktvq.com/news/local-new...-zoomontanas-wolverine-kits-a-win-for-species), which makes me think they're the European subspecies. But both articles are a little tricky because they also throw in information about how rare the North American subspecies is, which makes them a little unclear.

(And of course, the articles are from 2023, which means theoretically the 2022 signs and the 2023 additions may not be the same -- although I'd assume they'd want them to be??).

So if there's a mix of both subspecies out there, I may need to wait before entering these.
I know the Minnesota Zoo has both the Eurasian and American Subspecies. I don't know the status for any other zoos, but I would assume most other AZA institutions keep Gulo gulo gulo
 
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