Word: mason
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...median life span plummets, and they quit breeding - the last things you would want for a creature you're ostensibly trying to help survive. "Whether or not it's valid to say zoos keep species alive depends on which species you're talking about," says animal-welfare scientist Georgia Mason of the University of Guelph in Ontario. "Many species do well. Elephants don't." (See TIME's top 10 animal stories...
...wizened 56. Asian elephants, the more endangered of the two species, live 18.9 years in captivity and 41.7 in the wild. A few superannuated wild elephants have actually reached their 70s, and in Kenya, from 30% to 50% of the noncaptive population hits at least 50. "So far," says Mason, one of the authors of the new study, published in the journal Science, "we've got 300 African elephants in zoos in Europe, and no one's yet reached...
...humans, can be a direct result of too many calories and too little exercise. What's more, baby elephants born in captivity are noticeably chubbier from the start than those born in the wild. That may be a result of the mothers weighing too much, but whatever the reason, Mason worries that as in humans, overweight juveniles are overwhelmingly likelier to grow into overweight adults, with all the attendant health risks...
...Asian species. Wild African elephants are often infected with a form of herpes virus that causes them little illness or discomfort, but when the two species were brought together in zoos, the virus jumped to the Asians and mutated into a lethal form. "Zoos have accidentally created this," says Mason. "It's killing Asian elephant adults, and it's a leading cause of the species' infant mortality." (See pictures of Asian elephants...
...among wild elephants. Mothers invest two years in their pregnancies, they live in stable matriarchal groups, and females collectively care for the young. In captivity, mothers are often held in relative solitude, undergo stressful and painful births, and then simply kill the source of all that suffering. Some mothers, Mason says, may even turn to infanticide because they just don't know what the small, squirmy creature that suddenly appeared in front of them is. "Many females in zoos have never seen a calf," she says, "so they may not recognize...