During the week-long exercise, information including new animals born at the zoo is added to records used to help plan zoo management and breeding programs for endangered animals.
Animal rights groups have instead continued to press for even bigger changes at the company's parks, including the release of SeaWorld's 29 orcas to seaside sanctuaries and the end of breeding programs for all other captive animals.
ESTs obtained from the latter activity provide valuable resources for gene discovery, large-scale expression analysis, improved genome annotation, elucidation of phylogenetic relationships and facilitation of breeding programs for both plants and animals through provision of SSR and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genetic markers [ 29].
Mate allocation, i.e., the process of selecting mating pairs from a population of females and some portfolio of males, has a long history in animal breeding programs for both general [ 16, 18, 34– 36] and trait-specific [ 37] applications.
When breeding programs for I. glauca are planned in future, the populations, which have high genetic diversity has more potential for breeding programs.
The goal was to capture two males and two females, since a captive breeding program for the animals is being contemplated.
Based on the observed resistance to TSE in homozygous ARR animals, a breeding program for resistance to scrapie and BSE has been implemented in several EU countries to control human exposure to TSE risk.
It put the red wolf on the endangered list in 1973 and started a captive breeding program for it in 1980, but reintroducing the animals has proven difficult, because they readily mate with coyotes.
SeaWorld Entertainment won the praises of animal rights activists last month when it made a surprising policy reversal and agreed to end the breeding program for its captive killer whales.
The information can also be used by captive breeding programs in selecting animals for mating that aren't closely related.
