Lumpy skin disease caused by a capripoxvirus was observed in a captive-bred female Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) at the National Wildlife Research Center, Taif, Saudi Arabia. Clinical signs included severe general depression with fever, anorexia, greater than 1,000 nodular cutaneous lesions and gradual recovery over 2 mo. The virus was found by electron microscopy and paired sera showed an increasing virus neutralization antibody titer against capripoxvirus. A serologic survey of the herd of 90 oryx showed a low prevalence (2%) of this infection. This report describes the first case of lumpy skin disease in an Arabian oryx.

In this study we investigate some applications of genetic markers in animal conservation, using the Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) as an example. Out of 66 sets of microsatellite primers from other ruminants, 58% were found to amplify microsatellites in Arabian oryx. Polymorphism (50% of loci amplified) and allelic diversity (mean 2.1 alleles/locus amplified) were within the range found in other ruminants. Arabian oryx (n = 343) representing most of the major groups world-wide were typed at six loci. Low but significant population differentiation was found between most oryx groups, suggesting that management of Arabian oryx has led to substantial genetic mixing between populations. Forty percent of the alleles in one additional Arabian oryx sample from the pre-extinction population in Oman were not found in any contemporary Arabian oryx, and two out of four contemporary populations were deficient in rare alleles, suggesting that the species has lost some neutral genetic variation. The microsatellite loci were sufficiently polymorphic for identification of an Arabian oryx sample in a forensic context, but were not sufficiently polymorphic for large-scale parentage inference. We suggest that it is important to evaluate whether genetic markers are likely to have sufficient power to answer particular conservation questions prior to committing conservation resources to genetic typing.Key: , lineage well represented; , lineage poorly represented (e.g. via single reproducing individual); ✘, lineage absent. Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Hamdan lineages are private collections in the United Arab Emirates.

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A total of 84 Gazella subgutturosa from three captive populations (two in Saudi Arabia, one in Qatar) were karyotyped. The number of chromosomes is 33, 32, or 31 for the males and 32, 31, or 30 for the females because of the X-autosome translocation that is common in the genus and a centric fusion between the two pairs of acrocentric chromosomes. The G- and R-banded karyotypes of gazelles translocated show that this fusion is the same as that previously reported for gazelles from Jordan. The precise origin of these populations is not known, but in every case the first animals are said to come from the wild in Saudi Arabia. This chromosomal translocation appears to be a populational polymorphism and not the result of hybridization between two different subspecies of G. subgutturosa.

An electrophoretic survey of blood markers of the Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) was undertaken in order to ascertain the genetic variability in a sample of 85 individuals, mainly from Saudi Arabian (Taif) and Jordanian herds. Three out of 18 loci were found to be polymorphic (P = 16.7%) and the mean heterozygosity (H = 0.052) appears to be relatively high with respect to the severe demographic bottlenecks expressed by the species since the 1960s. No genetic differentiation was found between Arabian and Jordanian samples considered. Consequences of these findings for the management of the Taif herd and for such procedures as pedigree determination are discussed, and an example of this latter application is given for a case of doubtful parentage.