Cheetahs on the Edge

National Geographic (Roff Smith)

Anticipation ripples through the crowd. Fingers tighten around binoculars. Camera lenses snap into focus. No fewer than 11 canopied safari buses, bright with tourists and bristling with long lenses, huddle near a solitary acacia tree in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. For the past half hour a mother cheetah named Etta has been sitting in the shade with her four young cubs, eyeing a herd of Thomson’s gazelles that drifted into view on a nearby rise. Now she’s up and moving, sidling toward the herd with a studied nonchalance that fools no one, least of all the gazelles, which are staring nervously in her direction.

Cats’ Stripes and Spots Are Tracked to a Gene

The New York Times (Sindya N. Bhanoo)

The gene that produces the striking dark stripes on tabby cats is also responsible for the spots on cheetahs, a new study reports.

And a mutation of this same gene causes the stripes in cats and spots on cheetahs to become blotchy.

“Nobody had any idea what the genes were that were involved in these things,” said Stephen O’Brien, a geneticist now at St. Petersburg University in Russia and one of the researchers who led the study. “When the feline genome became available, we began to look for them.”

India Court Suspends Plan to Reintroduce Cheetah

BBC

India’s Supreme Court has directed the government to suspend a move to reintroduce the cheetah, eradicated in India by hunting nearly a century ago.

The court’s decision came after some experts described the plan as “totally misconceived”.

Royal Couple Attend African Cats Film Premiere

BBC

Big Cats Wild for Calvin Klein Cologne?

National Geographic

Wildlife Conservation Society researchers at the Bronx Zoo found that captive cheetahs were attracted to Calvin Klein’s “Obsession for Men” fragrance. That and other scents were tested in the wild to see if big cats would approach camera traps used for behavioral studies.