The Quagga project : progress over 20 years of selective breeding : research article

The quagga project has now been in progress for over 20 years. Its aim, given conclusive molecular evidence that the quagga and the plains zebra, Equus quagga, are conspecific, is the retrieval of the pelage characteristics of the quagga by selective breeding from a selected panel of plains zebra individuals. The programme has now over 25 third generation progeny, and is starting to produce individuals with a degree of striping reduction shown by none of the original founders and which approximate the striping pattern shown by at least some of the known museum specimens of quagga. These results indicate that by the fourth generation the project should have largely succeeded in its aim, and will form the basis of a herd of individuals which can be displayed in the Western Cape as an illustration of a phenotype which had disappeared from extant populations of plains zebra.