I’ve just learned of some interesting work on the Iberian lynx, the world’s most endangered cat. Scientists at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas in Madrid has succeeded in freezing sperm from lynx, thawing it out and then using it to fertilise an egg. This is something.

Freezing and unfreezing are brutal processes that have a habit of destroying the integrity of cells. In fact, there are only a few cases where frozen sperm cells from endangered species have gone on to produce live offspring. The black-footed ferret, of course, is the most memorable. Then there’s the cheetah, the Mohor gazelle, the Bactrian camel and a string of other mammals. Very few, if any, reptiles incidentally. I know of a scientist, years ago, who successfully thawed out an ejaculate from an Angolan python and found about 10% of the sperm swimming. I can’t think of any other examples of gamete cryobiology in the reptile world. Not just now anyway.

But what’s really interesting about the lynx work is that the defrosted sperm was not fused with a lynx egg. After all, what chance is there of getting a captive lynx (of which there can only be a few in the world) to yield an egg (which would require sedating her)? Practically none. So, it seems, the scientists had a brainwave and put the lynx sperm with bog-standard cat oocytes to see if the two would get along. And hey presto, they did.

It’s not that they were after creating a cat/lynx hybrid (though, I admit, I’d be fascinated to see one). They were trying to find a way to test out the viability of the thawed sperm, to demonstrate that it had survived the thawing process. This weird research, to be reported in September at the Felid Biology and Conservation Conference in Oxford in the UK, therefore offers a way to test the fertility of male lynx.

The challenge, unfortunately, is to find some. The size of the remaining population has got to be low. In the late 1990s, biologists identified five spots in Portugal where the lynx might still be found. They wandered through these wilderness zones, collecting lynx-like poo – 104 scats in all – and set about DNA fingerprinting these fecal remains in the hope it would give them an idea of the numbers of this elusive beast out there and the sex ratio of the remaining population. They were surprised by what they found – only two of the 104 putative lynx turds had actually come from lynx.

Oh, what strange things scientists get up to. I look forward to hearing more.