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It came back from under a hundred animals because the rabbits did.
The species eats almost nothing but European rabbit — up to ninety percent of the diet. When myxomatosis and then rabbit haemorrhagic disease swept Iberia, the lynx followed the rabbit down, and by 2002 there were fewer than a hundred animals left in two isolated populations in Andalusia. The limiting factor was never the cat.
Recovery was therefore built on rabbit habitat: scrub management, restocking of prey, captive breeding with careful genetic pairing, translocation into new territories in Spain and Portugal, and underpasses on the roads that were killing dispersing young. The population passed two thousand in 2023, and the IUCN downlisted the species from Endangered to Vulnerable in 2024.
The open shelf
More frames of the iberian lynx
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