Today Species360 Conservation Science Alliance student Catalina Manduta successfully defended her Master thesis at the University of Southern Denmark. Catalina presented her work on survival differences in contracepted versus non-contracepted animals in zoos.

She showed that surgical contraception in male mammals lead to an increase in life expectancy for nearly 80% of species, and explored different evolutionary hypotheses that can explain these differences. She particularly analysed the cost of reproduction hypothesis, which postulates that internal energy resources are finite, leading to a trade-off between reproduction and survival, thus potentially leading to a survival advantage in castrated individuals. However, her results could not confirm this hypothesis.