India in bid to revive cheetah

2003-02-09 20:53

Hyberabad, India - The cheetah, which went extinct in the Indian subcontinent half a century ago, could roam its forests once again thanks to a cloning project and the president of Iran.

Researchers at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad are working to clone the world's fastest land animal and need live specimens from the only place where the Asiatic cheetah still lives - Iran.

Two years of navigating diplomatic channels earned them little success, but fortunes changed in late January when Iranian President Mohammad Khatami walked through the centre's doors on a state visit to India.

"Now that President Khatami himself has visited us and responded positively to our request we're hoping things will speed up," said institute director Lalji Singh.

The cheetah, a spotted cat of up to 52kg that can run at more than 110km an hour, used to roam across much of Africa and Asia.

But the cheetah's majestic nature caught up with it, and hunters killed them by the thousands. The 20th century human population boom further infringed on the cheetah's habitat and exhausted its sources of prey.

More than 100 000 cheetahs lived around the world a century ago, but now only between 9 000 and 12 000 are believed left in the wild, mostly in small pockets of Africa. Another 300 live in Iran, according to conservationists.

In India, the cheetah was declared extinct in 1952, but Singh was optimistic at its chances for a comeback - relying on science, however, not nature.

Ideally, the Hyderabad researchers would like to work with a cheetah couple and mate the animals to help kickstart the new population.

Cocktail embryo

Failing that, tissue samples from a live cheetah - preferably from Iran as the carnivores there are Asiatic as the Indian cats were - hope to help researchers make the long march from test tube to the jungle.

Such research would most likely involve implanting genetic material taken from live cheetah cells into an egg produced by a female leopard, which has genetically close relations with the cheetah, thus creating a "cocktail embryo" to re-insert into the surrogate mother, Singh said.

If and when a cheetah specimen arrives in India, it would take another five years before an animal could be cloned, experts say.

The campaign to bring back the cheetah is part of an 110m rupee ($2.3m) project to clone India's endangered species out of potential extinction.

The Hyderabad institute is creating sperm, egg and cell banks of endangered species including the Indian lion and tiger, along with different kinds of deer and rare birds.

"The most effective way of saving a species from dying out is creating a large and diverse bank of its cells or sperms and eggs, which can then be used for artificial insemination or even cloning," said Singh.

The scientist acknowledged, however, that even historic scientific breakthroughs are limited by the dearth of habitat available - even for cloned animals.

Even if cheetahs are successfully cloned, to reintroduce them to the wild would again doom their fates as there is little there, and too narrow a gene pool, to ensure their survival. - Sapa-AFP

- SAPA