Nine zoo animals in Arizona helped bring the Arabian oryx back from extinction
The last wild Arabian oryx was reported in 1972, after decades of hunting from cars. A decade earlier, a captive herd had been started at the Phoenix Zoo with just nine animals. In 2011 the oryx became the first species to move from extinct in the wild all the way back to vulnerable.
The smallest of the oryxes, this antelope has a glowing white coat, brown legs, dark facial stripes and long ringed horns reaching up to 1.49 metres. It once roamed much of the Middle East, from Sinai and Iraq across most of Arabia, but by the mid-1930s survived only in Saudi Arabia's Nafud and Rub' al Khali deserts. Speed and stamina had protected it from hunters on foot. Then, from the 1930s, princes and oil company staff hunted it with rifles from vehicles, some hunts involving as many as 300 of them, and the northern population vanished by mid-century.
The rescue, sometimes called Operation Oryx, began in 1962 as the first zoo breeding herd, set up in Arizona by the zoo together with a London conservation charity, now Fauna and Flora International, and funded partly by the World Wildlife Fund. Phoenix has since recorded more than 240 births and seeded herds elsewhere. In 1968 Sheikh Zayed founded the Al Ain Zoo partly to protect such animals. Releases began in Oman in 1980, and oryx have since returned to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE and beyond. By 2016 there were about 1,220 wild animals and 6,000 to 7,000 in captivity. There was a setback: in 2007 Oman's oryx sanctuary became the first site ever struck off the UNESCO World Heritage List after the government opened 90 percent of it to oil prospecting, by which time its herd had shrunk from 450 to 65.
The oryx is superbly built for drought. In summer it lies still in shade by day, lets its body temperature climb rather than sweat, and cools off at night, while a mesh of fine arteries called the rete mirabile helps shed heat before blood reaches the brain. Together these tricks cut its water loss and resting metabolism by at least half, and it can go weeks without drinking, following distant rain to fresh growth.
Aristotle and Pliny thought the oryx was the model for the unicorn, and seen side-on or after losing a horn, which never regrows, it can look one-horned. It is the national animal of Jordan, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar.
Source: Arabian oryx
