Image Credit: Andrea Edwards, National Zoological Park
(Note: This article appears in the October, 2013 edition of The Shell, UMD's alumni newsletter. To view the entire newsletter, click here.)
To save one of the most endangered horses in the world, Budhan Pukazhenthi M.S.'92, Ph.D.'96 (left) first had to get up close to their urine.
He'd sit out in the pastures of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI), headquartered at its 3,200-acre research campus in Front Royal, Va., and wait for them to go. Then he'd pull samples from the damp dirt—one of the first steps in understanding their normal reproductive cycle.
A reproductive biologist at the Smithsonian Institution, Pukazhenthi led a team this summer that produced the first Przewalski's horse born from artificial insemination after seven years of research and trials.
Muscular but short, less than 5 feet tall, they're one of the few horse species to never be domesticated. There are fewer than 2,000 left in the world after the species went extinct in the wild in the 1960s. Several hundred were reintroduced in Mongolia and China in the 1990s, after years of efforts by U.S. and European zoos.
"It's an uphill battle but one that can be won if everything is in place," he says. "I want to help save these species. My dream is to see these animals back in the wild."
He's loved wildlife since he was a child (though domestic pets, not so much: "My mom tells me we had a dog, but I don't remember it."), and his goal was to study animals in their natural habitat. Halfway through veterinary school, he found his second passion, reproductive biology, and decided that was how he could help endangered species.
"My dream was to work as a scientist at the National Zoo," Pukazhenthi says. He started on that path as a graduate student in the School of Agriculture and Natural Resources, studying infertility in big cats like cheetahs and tigers through a cooperative program between the National Zoo and UMD.
Now, in addition to the Przewalski's horse, he also leads the Smithsonian's reproductive research team for five other different hooved species, or ungulates, including the Persian onager (similar to a donkey), two endangered deer, and two extremely rare North African antelopes.
"I look for projects where people have tried and failed," he says. "With wild horses, word had gotten around, saying collecting semen from a stallion couldn't be done." But he and his team worked systematically to make it happen.
He's hoping to recreate his success in the next few years to solidify a method that could be used to produce Przewalski's horses around the world. He's also hard at work on the next, more difficult method: artificial insemination from frozen sperm.
A key part of reproductive management is diversifying the gene pool as much as possible. But it's expensive and sometimes dangerous to move horses across countries or states, so being able to freeze sperm would provide many more opportunities to produce foals from different pairings. Sperm, however, is particularly tricky to freeze because it must not only survive the process, but be active and mobile enough to reach the egg when it's deposited into a female. Sperm from every species behave differently, so each species requires new chemical concoctions.
It's this behind-the-scenes work that Pukazhenthi hopes people will appreciate the next time they visit a zoo.
"The animals you see in zoos are ambassadors for the species," he says, noting that in addition to the one Przewalski's horse displayed at the zoo, there are 26 more at Front Royal. "It takes a lot of effort from various specialists to effectively manage these populations."
