Early reproduction retains fertility in cheetah females

Reproduction in free-ranging female cheetah in Namibia is far better than expected. Their reproductive organs are healthy and approximately 80 percent of their young reach adulthood. With these findings, scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin have overturned the established dogma that cheetahs generally reproduce badly due to their low genetic diversity. The scientists demonstrated that female fertility critically depended on the age at which they conceived their first litter...

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