Polar bear death mystery solved
Lars, a polar bear in the Wuppertal Zoo in Germany, survived an infection by a zebra virus. Image: Zoo Wuppertal/Barbarar Scheer Zoos bring together different animal species that would never encounter each other in the wild, with unforeseen consequences. When, in 2010, a polar bear died at a German zoo and another fell severely ill, veterinarians were at a loss to explain it.Now new research by an international team, including Dr Simon Ho from the University of Sydney, has discovered that the mystery death and illness were caused by a virus found in zebras 'jumping' to the polar bears.Their paper, recently published in Current Biology provides an insight into species-jumping diseases and their possible threat to the conservation mission of zoos.It has rarely been considered that the species mix found in zoos can have unpredictable consequences in terms of transferring pathogens among animals. Generally, pathogens adapt to a specific host, but some...