Did scientists revive an extinct animal or just breed a less stripey zebra?

An extinct female quagga foal whose tissue was harvested for DNA testing is now housed at the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town. (Charlie Shoemaker for WSJ)
An extinct female quagga foal whose tissue was harvested for DNA testing is now housed at the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town. (Charlie Shoemaker for WSJ)

Summary

A four-decade quest to bring the quagga back is being heralded as a success, but not everyone is impressed

CAPE TOWN, South Africa—If it looks like a quagga, gallops like a quagga and barks like a quagga, then it probably is a quagga. Or is it?

Scientists and conservationists here say they’ve brought a zebralike mammal back from the dead, giving the quagga a major win over the more-famous Woolly mammoth and Dodo bird in the global race to bring animals back from extinction.

But not everyone is celebrating. Detractors of the nearly four-decade quest insist it has produced nothing more than a skin-deep knockoff. “They’re effectively just making a zebra less stripey," said Douglas McCauley, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Quaggas were once endemic to southern Africa, but aggressive hunting decimated their population and the last known quagga died at the Amsterdam zoo in 1883. Unlike zebras, quaggas only had stripes on their heads, necks and sometimes backs. Their hindquarters were generally stripeless and brown while their belly and legs were white. The name quagga, with the g’s pronounced with a guttural “ch," is an onomatopoeic imitation of the shrill, barking sound the animal made.

In the early 1980s, the quagga became the first extinct animal whose DNA was sequenced, paving the way for other modern de-extinction efforts. Some scientists thought that the quagga, a subspecies of the most common type of zebra, could be brought back through selective breeding. While cloning creates an exact replica of an individual animal, rebreeding creates an entire population, with a more natural genetic variation. Only a subspecies can be rebred.

The Quagga Project, a nonprofit founded in 1987, acquired zebras with lighter, sparser or browner stripes to mate with each other, which resulted in reduced striping on the offsprings’ hind ends, legs and bellies.

It’s been a slog. Reinhold Rau, a German taxidermist who emigrated to South Africa in the 1950s and was the driving force behind the Quagga Project, died in 2006. Many of the original scientists have retired.

It takes about two years to evaluate whether a foal has markings that will move the breeding program forward. Stallions need to be relocated every five years or so to reduce inbreeding, and sometimes they don’t breed for two or three years with the mares in their new herd.

Still, by 2005, the scientists had produced an animal that looked just like the extinct quagga. The project says that about 10% of the 150 animals it owns now would blend easily into a 19th-century herd of quaggas.

“About every five years, we can stop and look and see if we’ve made any progress," said March Turnbull, the project coordinator for the Quagga Project, as he watched a herd of quaggas from a game vehicle at Vergelegen, a wine farm outside of Cape Town.

Vergelegen currently hosts 10 of the so-called Rau quaggas, including four born there, and Turnbull marveled at the lack of stripes on the hind ends and back legs of some of the animals.

“They’re just so good!" said Turnbull, an IT project manager who started volunteering for the project about five years ago after reporting on the resurrection effort during an earlier career as a journalist.

Critics say that the Rau quaggas might look like extinct quaggas, but likely lack characteristics and adaptations that the original animals possessed.

Turnbull says Rau wanted to rectify what he saw as a terrible wrong that had been done to the quagga.

As a child in Germany, Rau saw an animal at the Berlin Zoo that was part of a Nazi-funded project to rebreed the auroch, a giant, wild cattle that went extinct in the 1600s. The zoologist who ran that project postulated that the quagga could also be back-bred, an idea that stuck with Rau.

In 1969, while remounting a taxidermied quagga foal, Rau noticed the hide hadn’t been properly cleaned, and some dried tissue still stuck to it. He held on to that specimen until the early 1980s, when he sent that sample and others collected from a museum in Europe to geneticists at the University of California, Berkeley.

Their DNA analysis found that the quagga was in fact closely related to the plains zebra, and therefore a candidate for rebreeding. Other current rebreeding efforts include a new attempt in Europe to rebreed aurochs, while in the U.S. scientists are trying to back-breed a type of giant Galápagos tortoise that died off in the 1800s.

Even detractors of the Quagga Project say such rebreeding efforts are inherently more practical than what is likely the world’s most high-profile de-extinction effort—an attempt to revive the Woolly mammoth.

Scientists in the U.S. are using genome engineering technologies to edit the genes of an Asian elephant to make it more cold-tolerant, including engineering a shaggy coat, small ears and a domed cranium. They say they’re working to create a “cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological traits of the Woolly mammoth."

“Even if they succeeded, the obvious question is, what would you do with it?" said Stuart Pimm, a professor at the conservation ecology research unit at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “If you had a Woolly mammoth, you would put it in a cage. It’s a colossal exercise in ego."

Some of the criticism of the Quagga Project could be put to rest next year. That’s when Annelin Molotsi, a molecular biologist working on the project, plans to sequence the genome of the re-bred quaggas.

“I think it will answer a lot of questions," Molotsi said.

Even if the gene sequences show that the Rau quaggas don’t quite measure up to the real thing, the quagga rebreeding model could be used to rebuild populations of critically endangered animals, not just ones that have already gone extinct, says Peter Heywood, professor emeritus of biology at Brown University.

“Looking at the restored animals, even if they’re not the same as the ones that were lost," said Heywood, who has written a book about the quagga, “they are a symbol of hope."

Write to Alexandra Wexler at alexandra.wexler@wsj.com

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