Mating Music Helped Produce a Baby Cheetah - San Diego Zoo

The San Diego Zoo shows off a baby cheetah that was bred with bio-acoustics to help the mating mood.
Cub was born as a single cub to first-time mother Kenya. Because singletons are often rejected and Kenya does not have previous experience, animal keepers stepped in to assist. The cub was born Feb. 18, 2009 and can be seen at the Wild Animal Park's Animal Care Center.

In a world first, a rare baby cheetah owes its life to a doctored recording of a recently discovered male call that triggers ovulation.

Kenya, a first-time cheetah mom, gave birth to the healthy female cub on February 18 at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park, park officials announced earlier this month.

The cub is a direct result of research reported earlier this year describing a male vocalization called a stutter-bark.

Scientists at the park's Conservation Research had found that male stutter-barks trigger females' reproductive systems to start releasing eggs.

The finding was a potential boon, as cheetahs can be difficult to breed in captivity because females don't have regular ovulation cycles.

But there was still a catch: In captivity, certain females need to mate with particular males to maintain genetic diversity among the big cats.

Vocal Competition

Traditionally, scientists have found that their "arranged marriages" for the cheetahs don't always suit the animals' fancies—a situation that could have been aggravated by the fact that the recorded stutter-bark was from the park's dominant male cheetah.

If a female cheetah heard the call of the dominant—and probably more desirable—male, she might reject the male chosen for her as a good genetic match, the scientists feared.

"To compensate for this, I modified the dominant male stutter-bark call slightly using an acoustic software program," said Matt Anderson, the lead bioacoustics researcher on the project.

The software produced a stutter-bark that sounded authentic but was totally different from the calls of any of the park's males.




The audio manipulation not only worked, it surprised the scientists by inspiring a bit of the real thing. "We were delighted when the stutter-barks from this 'new' member of the cheetah group stimulated all our males to start stutter-barking themselves," Anderson said.

"The females heard these calls and started breeding with the males that we wanted them to breed with."

Shortly afterward Kenya was found to be pregnant, and three months later she gave birth to a single cub. She produced a daughter, but because it was only a single baby, and her first cub, caretaking was a bit of a problem. So the baby was brought to the Park’s Animal Care Center and will be incorporated into our cheetah education program. For now, if you want to see the baby, she is at the Wild Animal Park under the watchful care and supervision of the staff to make sure that she grows and develops into a healthy cheetah.

Fred Bercovitch is head of Behavioral Biology at San Diego Zoo Conservation Research.

Park staff are hopeful that the success could lead to more captive cheetah births in the future.

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