Quagga

Summary

The quagga (Equus quagga quagga) was a subspecies of the plains zebra native to the dry Karoo and the grasslands of South Africa's Cape, ranging largely south of the Orange River. It was distinguished by a striking, incomplete coat: bold brown-and-white stripes on the head and neck that faded progressively down the body and dissolved into a plain reddish-brown on the hindquarters and legs, which appeared almost horse-like. Its common name, transcribed from a Khoikhoi word, was onomatopoeic, imitating its barking call, rendered as "kwa-ha-ha."

Through the first half of the nineteenth century the quagga was hunted intensively by European settlers, principally for its meat and hide and to remove a grazing competitor with domestic sheep and goats. Because contemporary observers used the word "quagga" loosely for several kinds of zebra, the animal's status as a distinct form was poorly understood, and its disappearance from the veld went largely unremarked at the time.

The last wild quaggas were extirpated in the late 1870s; the final wild individual is generally reckoned to have died around 1878. A handful of captive animals lingered in European zoological gardens, the last of them a mare at the Natura Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam, who died on 12 August 1883. No one at the time recognized that her death marked the end of the subspecies.

The quagga survives today only as roughly two dozen mounted specimens, a few skeletons, and a small set of photographs of a single living animal taken in London. It holds two distinctions in the history of extinction: in 1984 it became the first extinct animal to have its DNA studied, and since 1987 it has been the subject of the Quagga Project, a long-running attempt to breed back its distinctive coat pattern from living plains zebras.

Decline Timeline

Profile

The quagga was a robustly built equid, measuring roughly 257 centimetres in length and standing about 125 to 135 centimetres at the shoulder. Its defining feature was the gradient of its markings: a heavily striped front grading into an unstriped, fox-brown rear, with a pale belly and legs. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this pattern was interpreted as evidence of a full species, but molecular work in the 1980s confirmed it to be a southern subspecies of the wide-ranging plains zebra, the most thinly striped form at the dry, southern edge of that species' range.

The animal inhabited the arid and semi-arid Karoo and the open plains of the Cape, grazing in herds across territory that increasingly overlapped with the expanding pastoral frontier of the Cape Colony. Like other plains zebras it was a social grazer, but the historical record of its behaviour is thin, drawn largely from travellers' accounts and from the small number of individuals kept in captivity in Europe.

Crucially, the quagga's taxonomic identity was unstable in the eyes of those who encountered it. Settlers applied the name to zebras generally, and the boundary between the quagga and neighbouring striped forms was blurred. This confusion would prove fatal in a quiet, bureaucratic way: when the species was vanishing, almost no one knew enough to notice.

The Decline

The quagga's decline was driven by sustained commercial and subsistence hunting. Its hide was valued and its meat used to provision farms and feed labourers, while ranchers regarded the herds as competitors for the grass needed by sheep and goats. Across the early decades of the nineteenth century the animal was shot in large numbers, and by the 1850s it had already vanished from much of its former range.

The final wild populations held on longest in the Orange Free State, where the last of them were destroyed in the late 1870s; the last confirmed wild individual is usually dated to 1878. Because the quagga was not recognized as a separate, threatened animal, there was no contemporary alarm, no protective measure, and no organized effort to preserve breeding stock. Its extinction unfolded as an unremarked side effect of frontier agriculture.

The depth of the misunderstanding is captured by events after the Amsterdam mare's death in 1883: the zoo, unaware that the subspecies was gone, simply requested a replacement, and hunters assumed more animals could be found further inland. By the time naturalists grasped that the quagga as a distinct form no longer existed, there was nothing left to save.

Aftermath

Roughly 23 mounted specimens of the quagga survive in museum collections around the world, along with several complete skeletons and a small number of skulls — the physical archive of an animal that vanished before photography or science could document it properly. The London photographs of the living mare remain the only images of a quagga alive.

In 1984 the quagga entered scientific history a second time when researchers extracted and analysed mitochondrial DNA from a museum skin, making it the first extinct animal to have its genetic material studied. That work both confirmed its close relationship to the plains zebra and helped inaugurate the field of ancient DNA.

Three years later, in 1987, the taxidermist Reinhold Rau launched the Quagga Project in South Africa, selectively breeding plains zebras that showed reduced striping in an effort to recover the quagga's distinctive coat. The resulting animals, named "Rau quaggas" in his honour, increasingly resemble the original in appearance. It is essential to be precise about what this is: a breeding-back program recreating a phenotype, a coat pattern, in living plains zebras. It is not the resurrection of the extinct subspecies itself, which remains gone.

Lessons

References

• Quagga Wikipedia
• The Quagga Project The Quagga Project
• DNA sequences from the quagga, an extinct member of the horse family Nature (Higuchi et al., 1984)
• Equus quagga (Plains Zebra) IUCN Red List