Founders from two subspecies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
“When people hear ‘wild ass,’ they think ‘donkey,'” Alan Templeton, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis who has worked on the Negev herd with Israeli colleagues, told his university’s news office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The founders came from the Shah of Iran’s zoo and were bred at Israel’s Hai-Bar Yotvata Reserve from 1968, and Templeton explained why their ancestry never worried him. “In the wild ass’s case, we really didn’t have any choice. The population of animals in the Shah’s zoo weren’t ‘pure,’ but rather hybrids of two of the five recognized subspecies of Asiatic wild ass. There isn’t any Negev subspecies anymore,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“As an evolutionary biologist, I err on the side of genetic variation. A species is not a static entity, it is an evolving population,” Templeton added. “We’re looking not just to restore a population, but rather to restore a population with evolutionary potential.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What the dung says about dinner<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Dung has been the main tool for watching these shy animals for years. “Being a good herbivore eating a low-calorie food they defecate a lot,” Templeton said. “It’s really amazing what you can learn from piles of dung scattered in the desert.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Ben-Gurion University of the Negev team led by first author Shrutarshi Paul, with Shirli Bar-David and Merav Seifan, used that idea in a 2026 paper in Global Ecology and Conservation. “We used DNA metabarcoding of fecal samples collected across seasons and space to characterize the diet of the reintroduced Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus) in the hyper-arid Negev Highlands, Israel, where vegetation is sparse,” the authors write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We detected 108 plant genera from 45 families, revealing a diverse diet composed primarily of native woody and herbaceous plants,” they report. A small shrub genus called Helianthemum turned up in all of the samples, and native genera accounted for 91.4 percent of the plant DNA that could be named.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Despite pronounced seasonal and spatial variation, we found no evidence of selective foraging on specific taxonomic groups, including rare or vulnerable plant taxa. Consumption of agricultural or garden-derived plants was minimal,” the paper says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “From conservation perspective, our findings provide cautiously optimistic evidence for the successful integration of reintroduced Asiatic wild asses into the Negev Highlands,” the authors conclude, a question that also follows newer grazing projects like the bison released in central Spain to graze down wildfire fuel<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Breeding in this species revolves around water. “Because males cannot defend or monopolize unstable female groups, they defend territories near valuable resources that females need, such as food patches and water sources,” Noa Yaffa Kan-Lingwood and her co-authors explain in Molecular Ecology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “In May 2020, a new intervention plan was implemented in the Negev Highlands to redistribute and increase the number of artificial water sources, where three new artificial water sources were established near the Egyptian border,” they write. The old one at Nitzana “was permanently shut down in September 2020.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We found that increasing the number of available water sources from one to three led to a substantial increase in territorial, reproducing males, from 16%\u201318% before management to 42%\u201348% afterward,” Kan-Lingwood, a PhD student at Ben-Gurion University, said in a university release<\/a> on an April 2026 paper in Ecological Applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “New reproducing males were observed mainly near the new water sources, suggesting new territorial establishment and indicating that changes in resource distribution can rapidly reshape mating opportunities and improve the genetic representation of individuals in the population,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Molecular Ecology follow-up, published August 17, 2026, with Templeton and Daniel Rubenstein of Princeton University among the authors, checked who fathered the foals. “Using 2509 faecal samples (2020\u20132024) genotyped at 625 SNPs, we assigned parentage to 73 offspring,” the team writes, referring to single-letter genetic markers that differ between animals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Across 63 successful breeding events that occurred during 2020\u20132023, females produced offspring with new males in 87.3% of cases,” the paper says, and “in 68.3% of cases, new reproducing males were less related to females than were veteran males.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The principle extends to other social species threatened by low population sizes that rely on limited resources. It is an important and encouraging finding in the context of climate change and ongoing species decline,” said Bar-David, who leads the Conservation and Ecological Genetics lab at Ben-Gurion University, about a problem that also shadowed the wolves rebuilt from 19 animals on Isle Royale<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The acacia claim fits another animal better. A 2014 study in Animal Conservation compared which plants are spread by reintroduced Arabian oryx, reintroduced wild asses and native dorcas gazelles in the Negev.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We found that each of the ungulates dispersed a different assemblage of plant species with little overlap, highlighting the importance of the reintroduction of both species in ecosystem restoration,” the authors wrote. “Oryx were the key dispersers of acacia seeds, and oryx-ingested seeds planted with oryx pellets had a germination success 250 times higher than non-ingested seeds planted without pellets.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The wild asses still spread their own mix of plants, much as Iberian lynx turned out to spread seeds in Spain<\/a>, but the acacia result belongs to the oryx.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wells dug by wild equids are real, but none of the Negev studies cited here describes the herd digging them. The measured case comes from the American Southwest. A 2021 study in Science led by Erick Lundgren, who began the work as a graduate student at Arizona State University, found feral donkeys and horses in Arizona and California digging wells up to about 6.6 feet (2 meters) deep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I was fascinated by them because these landscapes that I was working in used to have equids not that long ago,” Lundgren told ASU News<\/a>. “And then when I saw them digging wells, it fascinated me because I had years ago read about elephants doing this in Africa and how sometimes during the dry season, the only water available is in these wells that elephants dig.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Which is not to say that we’re claiming these animals are saviors. We’re just studying them as wildlife,” he said. In the Negev Highlands, the Ben-Gurion diet paper notes, the herd’s movements depend on “artificial waterholes, maintained by the Israel Nature and Park Authority.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The diet team is upfront that it did not count plants in the field. “The absence of concurrent vegetation surveys and grazing assessments limit our ability to differentiate between active dietary selection and a passive reflection of resource availability,” they write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Head counts differ, too. In 2022, Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority put the wild herd at about 300 animals, the diet paper says “the current population is estimated at ca. 350 individuals,” and the breeding paper gives a minimum of about 250 for the Negev Highlands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The breeding team adds that the herd’s low effective population size can “still pose a risk to the population’s long-term persistence,” and that “similar water source changes should be applied cautiously, as other wild or domestic herbivores may also respond to changes in water source availability.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The paper also cautions that its comparisons “did not provide clear evidence that successful breeding events consistently involved the least related available male.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/wild-asses-drinking-negev.jpg\")
New water points changed who breeds<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Oryx carried the acacia seeds<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The well study came from Arizona<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What the studies cannot show yet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n