The National Zoo’s conservation facility in Virginia is celebrating the birth of four rare maned wolves.
The pups were born January 5 to 8-year-old Salina, their mother, and Nopal, their father, who was born four years ago at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal. Scientists are looking after the pups very carefully because it’s fairly common for wolves to die in the first month of life.
Maned wolves are hard to breed in captivity, and the number of them in North American zoos has fallen by 20 percent in the past five years. That’s a problem, because there are only about 20,000 of the animals, which live in central South America, still in the wild.
The wolf pups are not likely to ever call the National Zoo home. When they are older, they will probably be sent to other zoos in order to breed, a zoo spokeswoman said. But the zoo does have two adult maned wolves; their home is close to the cheetahs.
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