Earth Protect Blog

By Mead Gruver

The Associated Press

CHEYENNE>> Two more black-footed ferrets have been cloned from the genes used for the first clone of an endangered species in the U.S., bringing to three the number of slinky predators genetically identical to one of the last such animals found in the wild, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Wednesday.

Efforts to breed the first clone, a female named Elizabeth Ann born in 2021, have failed, but the recent births of two more cloned females, named Noreen and Antonia, in combination with a captive breeding program launched in the 1980s, is boosting hopes of diversifying the endangered species.

Genetic diversity can improve a species’ ability to adapt and survive despite disease outbreaks and changing environmental conditions.

Energetic and curious, black-footed ferrets are a nocturnal type of weasel with dark eye markings resembling a robber’s mask. Their prey is prairie dogs, and the ferrets hunt the rodents in often vast burrow colonies on the plains.

Black-footed ferrets are now a conservation success story — after being all but wiped out in the wild, thousands of them have been bred in captivity and reintroduced at dozens of sites in the western U.S., Canada and Mexico since the 1990s.

Because they feed exclusively on prairie dogs, they have been victims of farmer and rancher efforts to poison and shoot the land-churning rodents — so much so that they were thought to be extinct, until a ranch dog named Shep brought a dead one home in western Wyoming in 1981. Conservationists then managed to capture seven more and establish a breeding program.

But their gene pool is small — all known black-footed ferrets today are descendants of those seven animals — so diversifying the species is critically important.

Noreen and Antonia, like Elizabeth Ann, are genetically identical to Willa, one of the original seven. Willa’s remains — frozen back in the 1980s and kept at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo — could help conservation efforts because her genes contain about three times more unique variations than are found among black-footed ferrets, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Elizabeth Ann still lives at the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center near Fort Collins, but she has been unable to breed, because of a reproductive organ issue that isn’t a result of being cloned, the Fish and Wildlife Service said in a statement.