Cheetah 100k Texture Pack Download
Anna Pybus
Or watch them lope effortlessly alongside a truck going 25 miles an hour, waiting for gamekeepers to toss them five-pound chunks of giraffe meat. They glide soundlessly, unblinking amber eyes focused only on dinner. Listen as they chase a rag flicked like a fishing lure back and forth in the high grass. They pivot like dancers, ropy tails twirling for balance as the cat feet tremble the earth like jackhammers. Cheetahs weigh between 75 and 120 pounds, but their whippy torsos are nothing more than stripped-down chassis for fabulous legs. Nothing out-quicks a cheetah.
Kanini, whose name means "Little One" in the Namibian language of Oshivambo, stops chasing the lure. She jogs regally back and forth between Marker and me, rubbing against our trousers and clamoring for attention, her purr gurgling like an idling Ferrari. Her beautiful coat feels like AstroTurf; it is an incongruity in what otherwise seems a perfect creature, but it is probably a blessing. Thanks to its rough texture, there is little market for cheetah fur.
Marker, striking at 54, probably knows more about cheetahs than anyone alive. She tracks them, tags them, knocks them out and samples their blood, checks their poop to see what they eat and provides guard dogs to Namibian farmers and ranchers to keep them away from livestock. She also takes her work home with her. When David Wildt, a biologist at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., first met her 30 years ago, the only thing he knew about her was that she slept with a cheetah named Khayam curled next to her bed. "That really impressed me," he says.
The sum total of what was then known about cheetahs at Wildlife Safari was that they were fascinating, standoffish and virtually impossible to breed. The cheetahs had been isolated on a hilltop away from visitors in hopes they would mate. Captivated, Marker started to ask questions, read books and conduct research about the animals. "I plod," she says. "But I'm a finisher." (In 2002, at 48, she earned a PhD from Oxford University. Her dissertation, Aspects of Cheetah [Acinonyx jubatus] Biology, Ecology and Conservation Strategies on Namibian Farmlands, is considered the last word on cheetahs.)
The blood samples went to Stephen O'Brien at NIH. He had studied the domestic cat as a model for human viral cancers and was interested in genetic variation. In most cat species, enzymes in the blood differ genetically between individuals by 20 percent to 50 percent. But the cheetahs' blood enzymes were all alike. "We found nothing," says O'Brien, no variation at all. After looking at 52 genes, O'Brien halted the study. The cheetahs were virtual clones.
In Oregon, Wildt and O'Brien took skin samples from eight Wildlife Safari cheetahs and grafted them onto other cheetahs. Ordinarily, as in human transplants, a host will reject a donor organ unless there is a close tissue match and an assist from immunosuppressant drugs. But the cheetah grafts were accepted in every case. This was disturbing news, for it meant that their immune systems were so similar that almost every cheetah in the world had the same vulnerability to the same diseases. In fact, in 1982, Wildlife Safari lost 60 percent of its cheetahs to an epidemic of viral peritonitis. "It went through the center like wildfire," Marker says. The same disease in any genetically diverse cat population could be expected to kill 2 percent to 5 percent of its victims.
Where had the cheetah gone wrong? By analyzing the few variations in cheetah DNA, O'Brien and Wildt determined that cheetahs had passed through a population "bottleneck" about 12,000 years ago. Some apocalyptic event had wiped out all but a few animals that then interbred, with disastrous consequences for the animal's gene pool. The obvious culprit was the onset of the last ice age, a cold snap that coincided with the extinction of saber-toothed cats, mastodons and other large prehistoric mammals. Fossil evidence shows that cheetahs evolved in North America about 8.5 million years ago and then spread throughout Asia, India, Europe and Africa; the modern species appeared about 200,000 years ago. The bottleneck wiped out all of North America's animals.
Wildt, O'Brien and Marker's National Zoo-led studies have informed everything that has happened in cheetah management and conservation since the 1980s. Researchers now know that the cheetah will not be a robust, vigorous species anytime in the foreseeable future and that saving the animals, Marker's proclaimed goal, thus requires a combination of strategies. Protecting and studying them in the wild is one approach, while at the same time scientists are refining techniques to breed them in captivity, hoping to build what Wildt calls an insurance policy for the wild population. The work continues today at the new Cheetah Science Facility in Front Royal, Virginia.
In Namibia, 95 percent of cheetahs live on territory owned by ranchers. When Marker first got there, ranchers typically called cheetah "vermin" and killed about 600 every year. Marker's plan was simple. From the Windhoek airport, she traveled north in her Land Rover toward Otjiwarongo, "going door-to-door, talking to two farmers a day," she says, asking them how they managed their cattle herds, what they thought about the wildlife on their property and what problems they thought cheetahs were causing.
The best ranches, Marker told the ranchers, kept records for each animal, used herdsmen to spot cows ready to calve, then brought them into an enclosure until they did so. She explained that cheetahs won't come near donkeys, which can be extremely aggressive with other animals, including dogs, jackals and even leopards. She suggested using donkeys to guard cattle herds. "It was all information I could use," Schneider recalls, "never accusing." He now chairs the Waterberg Conservancy, a vast expanse of Namibian plains owned by 11 neighboring ranchers and the Cheetah Conservation Fund.
For the first few years, Marker camped in a succession of loaned farmhouses. In 1994, she bought the CCF property for $350,000 with grant money and a gift from a benefactor with ties to the Cincinnati Zoo. The property sprawls over 100,000 acres of savanna in the heart of cheetah country.
By that time, many of the ranchers had stopped killing cheetahs and were instead bringing those they had trapped to Marker, who took blood and semen samples from the animals, checked their age and health, and tagged and released them. Since 1991, Marker has done these work-ups on more than 800 cheetahs. She also established a sanctuary for motherless cubs; today it houses 46 orphans.
Today Marker, who gets donations from around the world, supervises 13 full-time professionals and 25 support staffers. At any one time she may have a dozen or more visiting researchers, veterinarians and students on-site. She has scientific or educational ties to universities all over the world. At local high schools, her helpers teach kids about farm surveys and radio tracking, biomedicine and genetics, publicity and fund-raising. Under the aegis of the conservation agency Earthwatch, volunteers can take working vacations at the Fund, doing everything from fence-building to cheetah-feeding. Marker has powerful friends. Sam Nujoma, independent Namibia's first president, is the Fund's formally designated "patron," and Marker is currently the chair of the Conservancy Association of Namibia, the umbrella organization of Namibia's conservation-minded landowners. She also maintains an international cheetah studbook.
Marker, whose second marriage ended in 1996, now lives with Bruce Brewer, a former curator at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo. He manages most of the day-to-day affairs at the Fund, which has grown to include dormitories, a mess hall, classrooms, research facilities and labs, a guest house and a gift shop. Marker makes fund-raising trips each year to the United States, has a satellite program in Kenya, assists cheetah conservation efforts in Algeria and Iran, trains farmers in Botswana and breeds dogs in South Africa.
"Our approach is for the community to live with its wildlife," Marker says. "But you have to give them a reason." Many ranchers in Namibia's cheetah country now encourage tourists, researchers and other animal lovers to enjoy the wildlife. "Laurie saw the bigger picture," says rancher Schneider-Waterberg. "She was talking about how the whole world was going to know about the cheetahs. And it does."
When we think about the chase, Cheetah comes to our Mind. Truly, Cheeta is the king of chase. It is a diurnal hunter and as It hunts during the day primarily. This big cat is quite nimble at high speed and can make quick and sudden turns in pursuit of prey. It can get many automobiles past himself. It is most successful hunter in the big cats family. When the moment is right a cheetah will sprint after its prey and attempt to knock it down. If you want to learn more, go through these interesting facts about this fastest animal on the planet, Cheetah:
Its fur is of tan color that allows it to blend easily in tall grasses of the grassland. Its entire body is covered with black spots. The pattern of spots in every cheetah is different, making each one of them uniquely identifiable.
source: factslegend.org, image: more-sky.com
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