The hope of his species rests on this little lynx cub and his peers. Because the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus), which is only found in Spain and Portugal, is one of the rarest cat species in the world – there are probably only a good 200 animals left in the wild.
The Iberian lynx was originally spread across the entire Iberian Peninsula. They lived there in the more open landscapes such as cork oak forests or scrubland. The nocturnal lynxes mainly hunt wild rabbits, but also mice and other small mammals and birds. Compared to their close relative, the Eurasian lynx that is also found here, the Iberian lynxes are smaller, more delicate and more clearly spotted.
But the Iberian lynxes are critically endangered. Due to a viral disease, the loss of their habitat and hunting, their population was drastically decimated in the course of the 20th century. Experts estimate that there are now only a little over 200 lynx lynxes, most of them in the Andalusian National Park Donana and in the Sierra de Andujar.
It is now the hope of conservationists and biologists to save the rare lynxes from extinction by conservation breeding. The cats have been successfully bred in breeding stations in Andalusia since 2005 – around 100 young animals have already been born under this program. In 2009 the first Iberian lynx were released from this breed and have since reproduced in the wild.
Help for the lynx and other endangered cat species also comes from science. This is because researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research have developed a method that can be used to preserve frozen cells in the male reproductive tract of these cats even after their death. Because there is a risk of genetic impoverishment in the small remaining stocks, this opens up the opportunity to produce mature sperm from these conserved stem cells and immature sperm and thus preserve the genes of this male for breeding. This method has already been successful in tests with house cats, a cheetah and an Asian gold cat.