How to make a quagga

It was a fine day in Cape Town so we thought that looking for quaggas would be a great idea.
I can’t say that our plans were well advanced or considered. There was no discussion on what the well-dressed quagga observer should wear, whether field glasses are a desirable optional extra or if sandwiches and flasks of drinks should be taken along to fortify us.

But no matter. Cape Town is close to being the quagga epicentre of the universe. Planning or forethought is not really required.

But I’m running ahead of myself. If you know anything about quaggas, you know they’re widely thought to be extinct, so field glasses are hardly of use.

You can in fact check out a real, dead quagga in Cape Town. This is a two-week-old infant, which died in about 1860. It now looks out forlornly from one of the glass cases at the Iziko museum in the gardens behind Parliament and Tuynhuys.

The stuffed infant is a rare creature: only five museums worldwide have quaggas as exhibits. There is just one surviving skeleton, 23 pelts and a few splendid paintings. Only one quagga was photographed alive (in black and white, of course).

This quagga lived in the London zoo until 1872.

Legislation was passed in 1886 by the Cape authorities to protect the quagga, but it was too late and the last known quagga had already died in the Amsterdam Zoo three years earlier.

To see Iziko’s quagga, go to the mammal section and look for the massive glass case housing the rhino. You can’t miss it, really, because thieves smashed a hole in the glass and sawed off its horn.

Right next to the hornless rhino is the baby quagga. It is not easy to spot because the exhibit is so precious, it is not lit up. You have to press a switch to see the little brown beast.

My informants at Iziko were unable to say how it ended up there, but it originally came from the Eastern Cape and had not been stuffed very well from an anatomical point of view.

Reinheld Rau
Resident taxidermist Reinheld Rau remounted the animal in the 1980s and in the process kept some of the tissue still attached to the skin.

The quagga at this time was widely believed to be a separate species (Equus quagga quagga) from the Plains zebra (Equus burchelli).

Rau was convinced that the two were not separate species. He sent the tissue samples overseas for analysis. The results showed that the quagga is a sub-species of the Plains zebra and that the two have the same DNA.

If the two are genetically the same, then selective breeding of the most quagga-like zebras could bring back the animal.

Beginning in 1987 Rau was able to convince reserves such as Etosha in Namibia to supply suitable animals and landowners in the Western Cape to accommodate them.

The programme has sometimes incorrectly been seen as an attempt to use science to bring back the dead as in the famous case of the movie Jurassic Park.

But selective breeding is a much simpler idea, for instance, to breed short (dachshund) or large dogs (Great Danes).

Rau developed a formal method of analysing the zebra’s stripes. The selective breeding has shown a strong stripe correlation between parents and offspring, for males and females.

Far Horizons
Four generations later, on Far Horizons — a wine farm near Wellington — Harley was born in May this year.

Far Horizons is a pleasant drive through the winelands, a little less than an hour from Cape Town.
Harley created a stir in fancier quagga circles. She attracts a steady stream of well-wishers to have a close look at her.

She is a cheerful creature, living with a small group of other project animals. There is only one defining characteristic: the absence of stripes on her legs and rump and thinner than usual ones on her back.

Quaggas, simply put, are browny, half-striped zebras. Their northern cousins are black and white and have stripes all over.

The further south the creature migrated, it appears, the less need there was for stripes and the greater the requirement became for it to be brown rather than black and white.

Harley, it has to be said — with other project animals — has shed a large proportion of her back-end stripes and our viewing party of three agreed that this little family of animals had more of a brownish tone.

There is also a project animal known only as EMO8, which has even fewer stripes than Harley.

DNA studies
Rau’s quagga infant has opened the field of DNA studies on extinct animals, according to Yale’s Gisella Caccone. The analysis shows that the quagga descended from a population of Plains zebra between 120 000 and 290 000 years ago during the last ice age.

Caccone said the distinct quagga body type and colouring evolved rapidly. ‘The rapid response of coat colour in the quagga could be explained by disrupted gene flow because of geographical isolation, an adaptive response to a drier environment, or a combination of both these forces,” she said.

On the way to the Cape we stopped at the impressive Karoo National Park near Beaufort West, where some of the animals involved in the quagga project live. These creatures looked like zebras to me.

Harley is distinctly less stripey, but is she a quagga and, if not, will her children, or their children, be quaggas?

Eric Harley, a UCT professor and project board member, says there will probably not be complete agreement about whether the project has produced a ‘real” quagga.

‘We are certainly close to getting some animals which approximate the quagga phenotype [appearance].”

Harley said that as the quagga was defined only by the appearance of its pelage, ‘if we get an animal, which conforms closely to that, then we have effectively retrieved the quagga”. (He uses the word ‘retrieve” because ‘recreate” justifiably upsets some conservationists.)

‘Certainly, we have only by the third generation of selective breeding produced some excellent animals that are much closer to the quagga phenotype than to that of fully striped Plains zebras.

‘We haven’t achieved the full dark-brown background colour shown by some [but not all] of the museum quaggas yet.

‘That may come in time, but I’m not too worried if it doesn’t, because that is a pretty variable feature in both museum skins and in paintings of the quagga.”

It should be clear that quagga-spotting is no simple matter. Yet, only 300 years ago, before the
colonists came up with words such as zebra (from the Portuguese zevra, apparently) no matter
how many stripes these wild, horse-like creatures had, they were all called quaggas.