Ocelot_OM-283_Swarts_Hilary_LosFresnosTX_10March2022_Reel4098.mp3

Hilary Swarts [00:00:00] In May of 2021, we had one of our lovely males, ocelot OM-283, beautiful boy, unfortunately hit by a car near the Refuge, not on one of the roads that had a wildlife crossing.

Hilary Swarts [00:00:19] And I got the call at, I don't know, maybe 2:45 in the morning. And by 4:30 I had the cat on ice.

Hilary Swarts [00:00:28] And in the morning, I took it to the Gladys Porter Zoo down in Brownsville, where Dr. Tom de Maar, who's a senior veterinarian there, was able to perform the orchiectomy.

Hilary Swarts [00:00:41] We bagged each testicle separately and I drove to the UPS Store and we overnighted it to the Cincinnati Zoo.

Hilary Swarts [00:00:51] And to our absolute astonishment and excitement, it proved to be a viable sample and they were able to freeze it. And before they froze it, they were able to see good motility, good morphology. Basically, I've learned a little bit - is what you want to see in sperm is that they're shaped correctly, they can swim, they can swim straight, and they can swim fast.

Hilary Swarts [00:01:18] So basically 36 hours after this male was killed, that semen was still viable. So that was like a really kind of an unknown and a really promising development.

Hilary Swarts [00:01:33] We later, I think, in July, end of July, went to the Albuquerque BioPark - Bill Swanson, Dr. Ashley Reeves, who's a veterinarian, also getting her Ph.D. in reproductive biology arena, and me. And they had been priming one of their captive ocelot females, named Lucy. They had been priming Lucy in the same way, like if you're a human and you're trying to get pregnant, you do injections to stimulate the follicles to produce eggs or, right, to drop eggs, basically. So Lucy had been in preparation.

Speaker [00:02:20] And I was just mostly watching. I left the veterinarians to do the, the surgical aspect. But basically they went in and looked at her ovaries and she had, gosh, I want to say, she had eight follicles on each ovary, which is an incredibly positive response to the, to the hormones.

Hilary Swarts [00:02:46] And they took OM-283's semen and deposited it in her oviduct directly. So when you do that, right, you're not asking as much of the sperm. It doesn't have to swim up a canal. It doesn't have to find anything. You're putting it basically right where it needs to go in an attempt to do artificial insemination with her.

Hilary Swarts [00:03:12] And it looked really promising. Unfortunately, she didn't end up getting pregnant.

Hilary Swarts [00:03:18] But you know, that's, that's how these processes work, right? There's still a lot more sperm left from him and from some of the trapped ocelots, male ocelots, and they'll keep trying it until they figure out how to get it right. And that may be another avenue to introduce greater genetic diversity into a wild population.