Journal's Focus on Black-Footed Ferret Marks 30 Years of Repopulation Efforts
Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - 13:30
in Biology & Nature
The black-footed ferret disappeared from the wild in the late 1980s. As predicted in 1929 in the pages of the Journal of Mammalogy, human persecution of prairie dogs, the principal prey of ferrets, took its toll on this species. When the first captive-breeding effort for ferrets failed, this member of the weasel family nearly became extinct.