Now for the last of the European bovines, the water buffalo. Unlike the bison (Bos bison) or aurochs (Bos taurus), the European water buffalo (Bubalus (bubalis?) murrensis) never returned to Europe after the last interglacial and eventually went extinct, possibly due to human presence in their glacial refugia. However the wild Asian water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis cf. arnee) made it to the eastern regions of Turkey, the Levant, and possibly the southern Caucasus during the early-mid Holocene, and the domestic descendants of the Asian species (Bubalis bubalis bubalis) have been common in eastern and south-eastern Europe for over a thousand years, where they have developed into robust and cold-resistant landraces. It would appear that buffalo still have an open niche in the European landscape, being more inclined to living in wetland habitats and consuming aquatic plants than their relatives in the genus Bos. It is unknown whether the extinction of the European species, which had disappeared from Europe and reappeared later several times as interglacial stages came and went, was ultimately due to human hunting or whether the species was naturally replaced in its refuges by the modern species, which was then prevented from recolonizing Europe by human activity. Frankly I’m not sure it matters, since the niche remains unfilled and either way it seems to me that humans are at least partially responsible for the lack of water buffaloes in Europe today.
The question would then be how to go about restoring the water buffalo niche to the continent. The process is already partially under way in the form of local domestic buffalo being used in grazing projects for wetlands in the Netherlands, Romania, and elsewhere. These animals are resistant to European pathology, and acclimated to its temperatures and available forage. Much like horses, and unlike cattle, they retain a less derived, less heterogenous appearance, and distinguishing them from wild animals would be difficult to the untrained observer. Consequently, converting these herds to an aesthetically and behaviourally appropriate wild population is considerably less difficult. Feral water buffalo are already quite common in many places around the world, but seeing as their wild progenitors are still very much with us, we have the option to explore hybridization as a means of expediting the process. The purpose of hybridization in this case is mostly just to increase the size of the animals, which have undergone the standard dwarfing associated with domestication, and to reintroduce wildtype behavioural genes. Now, the European breeds of water buffalo are all of the river type (Bubalus bubalis bubalis), as opposed to the swamp type (Bubalus bubalis carabao). This is because they descend from animals of Indian stock, which were domesticated from the Indian/Nepalese subspecies of wild buffalo, Bubalus bubalis arnee. The swamp type buffalo has a different number of chromosomes, and was domesticated separately, probably from the Indo-Malayan subspecies, Bubalus bubalis theerapati. As a consequence, animals used for hybridization should be of the arnee type, which I believe are the only variety present in European zoos in any case. These will have the same number of chromosomes as the domestic stock we’ll be using, and will also be adapted to slightly cooler habitats, such as those they might encounter in the Himalayan foothills. Due to the fact that the introgression would be coming from the ancestor taxon, rather than just a related taxon in this case, it is less important that the breeding process exclude sex chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA from the wild species, since they will likely be very similar anyway. Selection of the resulting crossbreeds will also be much less extensive, since all we want is a larger animal with uniform colour and non-domestic behaviour. Once the correct genetic material is there to build off of, natural selection will do most of the remaining work.
The European water buffalo’s former distribution suggests that it used riverways, such as the Danube and the Rhine, as a means of dispersal. It was never able to reach the Italian or Iberian peninsulas, possibly due to the absence of suitable pathways and an inability to cross the Alps or the Pyrenees. Resettlement of the genus should begin in Central European river deltas (the Oder Delta or Danube Delta, for example), allowing for natural dispersal elsewhere. Their suitability for other areas where their relatives never occurred will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis, and should take into account that buffalo fossils are very rare in Europe, and can be confused with bison or ox fossils, obscuring their true distribution.
I understand the use of domesticated European Buffalo and crossing them with Arnee to get a larger, uniform, wild looking animal but I also think that a population of pure wild water Buffalo would be a more interesting thing; a safe reserve for the Indian population that has very low numbers and probably a more interesting animal to go to a reserve to see. For smaller reserves a crossbreed would be fine but the Danube delta would surely have the space for the wild species. If wild aurochs had survived to the present in one isolated population would we in Europe have been content with seeing it crossbred and returned to our reserves or would we prefer to see the real thing? I would prefer to see Przewalski horse in French or Spanish reserves than primitive domestic horses with there domestic colours.
ReplyDeleteThe reason that we want to use crossbred animals is so that we can combine the best of both worlds: the climatic adaptation and local pathology resistance of local European breeds , and the wildtype bahaviour and size of the wild variety. Using just wild animals would be far more difficult since it would be harder to obtain a significant number for a starting population, and because they are not adapted to cooler environments. I would disagree with using exclusively Przewalski's horses in European reserves precisely because they don't display more than one colour. Several of these colours you describe as "domestic", including bay, black, and black-dun, have actually been proven to have existed in the European wild horse before they were domesticated. Domestic horses are more closely related to the European wild horse than the Przewalski's horse is, and they retain many of the genes and ecotypes that were unique to the original European variety.
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