An endangered gray wolf from San Francisco Zoo & Gardens has been safely transferred to a conservation center in New Mexico for breeding.
The Mexican gray wolf is the world’s most endangered wolf subspecies. San Francisco Zoo is home to four female Mexican gray wolves that are siblings.
One of the siblings, a 7-year-old named Alpha, was transferred this past week in an effort to increase the subspecies’ population.
“This is really huge for this subspecies,” Tina Hunter Burnam, the zoo’s curator of carnivores, said in a statement.
The Mexican Wolf Experimental Population Area covers large portions of Arizona and New Mexico and is designated as a reintroduction habitat for the wolves.
Alpha traveled to the ABQ BioPark Botanic Garden in Albuquerque to mate with a “viable male,” the zoo said.
As part of the program, the wolves are kept “wild,” meaning that they aren’t trained and have limited interaction with humans so that they can eventually be released.
If Alpha produces pups, they will be fostered into one of the wild packs and released.
“By breeding Alpha, her pups would eventually be released into the Mexican Wolf Recovery Area, essentially, contributing to the wild population and the re-establishment of this rare subspecies,” Hunter Burnam said.
Mexican gray wolves nearly went extinct due to hunting. When the population dwindled to only seven individuals, the wolves were officially designated as an endangered species in 1976.
Those seven wolves were rescued and bred in captivity, and the population eventually increased to about 286 Mexican gray wolves living in the wild today. Another 380 wolves are in managed care like the ones in the San Francisco Zoo.
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