A male specimen of maned maned guazú -a species that is threatened in our country- returned to its natural habitat after approximately a year of recovery and rehabilitation at the Temaikèn Species Recovery Center (CRET) of Escobar in Buenos Aires and the La Esmeralda Fauna Rescue and Interpretation Center in Santa Fe. The case presents the particularity that it was a very young cub. The challenge for the specialists of the CRET interdisciplinary team was to rehabilitate the animal helping it to develop the survival skills of the species “from scratch”, by its own means and without any contact with human beings.
The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change of the province of Santa Fe was in charge, based on the protocol for handling manedean guazú, of assisting him in the initial moments and referring him to the Temaikèn Foundation. Today, with a medical and behavioral discharge after months of successful development and learning, this maned maned man returned to the area of the submeridional lowlands in the north of Santa Fe. The animal belongs to a vulnerable species in Argentina, hence the importance of rescuing and rehabilitating specimens whose survival is threatened.
The rescue
The animal was found at the end of 2020 on the side of a route alone and in very poor condition. “When we received it, this maned man was very young. We do not know his age with precision, we calculate about 6 months, but we do know that for some reason he separated from his mother. If it had not been rescued, this animal was doomed to not survive because at this stage of its life it depends on its mother, since it feeds on her milk and she teaches him what he has to learn to later survive in adult life in the wild”, explains Cristian Gillet, head of Temaikèn Fauna Rescue and Rehabilitation.
Developing your natural instincts
Once at the CRET facilities in Escobar, the maned maned was housed in an open-air enclosure in total isolation and set with abundant natural vegetation that provided various shelters so that, in addition to recreating its habitat, it learned to hide.
The Temaikèn Foundation caretakers, through the cameras and avoiding direct contact to prevent it from getting used to the human being, saw how it managed to hunt rodents after several failed attempts and gradually increased its tracking capacity through stimuli. He also learned to fish in a small pool that was prepared for him on the premises.
Ready for reinsertion
After a complete rehabilitation and with the medical and behavioral discharge, he was fitted with a collar equipped with a satellite transmitter that It will allow to evaluate their survival and follow their evolution during their life in nature.
In this regard, Paula González Ciccia, director of Conservation, Education and Research at the Temaikèn Foundation, says that this device allows the animal to be tracked once it is reinserted and to follow all the points where it moves. “It is essential for us to know if the sanitary and behavioral rehabilitation was successful and to see where it moves in nature. The collar has a battery that lasts approximately 18 months and allows you to program a date when the device will automatically detach from the animal’s neck,” says the biologist.
“The information provided by the device, analyzed with other environmental variables, allows us to learn much more not only about this individual but also about the biology, ecology and behavior of the species, and the idea is to make this information available for the conservation of the maned maned wolf, that is so needed today”, affirms González Ciccia.
joint work
The rescue and rehabilitation of fauna is a task that requires the intervention of numerous actors and specialties in which, to enhance success, networking that articulates the capacities of each participating party is key. In this sense, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change of Santa Fe, Erika Gonnet, stated that “It is essential that we work in an articulated way between the different rescue centers in the country with the aim of helping the different animals who for different reasons join these institutions”.
For his part, the head of the General Directorate for Sustainable Fauna Management in Santa Fe, Dr. Pablo Siroski, pointed out that “the mutual collaboration agreement between the Temaikèn Foundation and the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change serves as a platform for this joint activity that manifests itself in the rescue, rehabilitation and generation of scientific information on spatial behavior and will allow us to learn even more about the species and strengthen conservation strategies through the Aguará Guazú Provincial Conservation Plan”.
About maned maned
It is an endemic canid of South America.which lives in open flooded areas between grasslands and islets of mountains and palm groves (in Argentina, in the provinces of Corrientes, Formosa, Chaco, north of Santa Fe and Córdoba and east of Santiago del Estero), and is characterized by its long legs and long red fur with a kind of dark mane on its head.
In our country there is threatened mainly by human action, through the loss and/or degradation of their optimal habitats, road kill, direct persecution, capture and illegal huntingsince little knowledge about the species surrounds it with myths and misinformation, such as the belief that it feeds on livestock or is dangerous to people, when its main diet includes fish, small rodents, birds, reptiles, and also fruits and with humans it is elusive.