Centre of hope for species on the brink.

Byline: Facility in Sharjah finds success with captive breeding programmes.

Sharjah: Captive breeding programmes at the Breeding Centre for Endangered Arabian Wildlife at Sharjah Desert Park have ensured that animals extinct in the wild are being kept alive.

The Arabian Oryx is extinct in the wild but through extensive breeding programmes the captive population has bounced back to more than 5,000.

Paul Vercammen, Operations Manager at the Breeding Centre for Endangered Arabian Wildlife at Sharjah Desert Park works to educate visitors on natural habitats.

"If you go in the mountains there is a huge amount of development so the natural environment is changing very very rapidly," he told Gulf News.

The Centre, he says, works to educate the public on the UAE's wildlife: "People who live in Dubai or other Emirates don't know what is living here. Local families remember animals from their father's time."

Regionally, efforts have been made to recreate natural habitats and to conserve a small amount of certain species; however a lack of diversity of herds, flocks or reptiles have meant the natural genetic quality of animals has decreased.

Some species are saved by being at the centre, said Vercammen, maybe in the future they could be released. The most important breeding has been carried out with Arabian leopards. The Centre started with 4 and today has a group of 27. Sixty-five leopards have been sent to other breeding centres or zoos. "We don't sell to private individuals. The animals go free of charge to participating breeding programmes once recommendations have been made. It is important to have pockets of original habitat and original species being conserved& Every species plays a specific role in evolution in the region. It is thought that there is nothing in desert and it can be destroyed," said Vercammen, "but it can be very easily destroyed because it depends on occasional rainfall - if it rains, six weeks later there is grass and the Oryx and gazelles will live off that.

"Genetically animals are becoming very isolated and developing problems associated with that. Long-term animals isolated in very small pockets with a bad environment - either it is too dry or there is not enough food - will die out, and then another pocket will die out. In the past they would have gone somewhere else."

Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the UAE, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Syria, Jordan and Iraq are such pockets of the Arabian Peninsula from where animals such as the Syrian wild ass, the Arabian ostrich and the Arabian Dorcas Gazelle have become extinct today.

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