Post by Admin Rose on Jun 3, 2012 13:38:52 GMT -4
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With fluorescent yellow eyes and tufts of hair sticking straight up behind their ears, Bonner and Etienne look like slightly crazed old men.
These riotous and chatty lemurs once ranged across eastern Madagascar. Now scores of these black-and-white ruffed lemurs are being bred here at the St. Louis Zoo and at other zoos across the U.S. as part of a broader effort to prevent their extinction.
But Ozzie, a lion-tailed macaque, will never father children. Lion-tails once flourished in the tops of rain forests in India, using their naturally dark coloring to disappear into the height of the jungle. Though there are only about 4,000 remaining in the wild, not one among Ozzie’s group here in St. Louis will be bred. U.S. zoos are on the verge of giving up on trying to save them.
Difficult choices
As the number of species at risk of extinction soars, zoos are increasingly being called upon to rescue and sustain animals, and not just for marquee breeds like pandas and rhinos but also for all manner of mammals, frogs, birds and insects whose populations are suddenly crashing.
To conserve animals effectively, however, zoo officials have concluded that they must winnow species in their care and devote more resources to a chosen few. So zookeepers are increasingly being pressed into making cold calculations about which animals are the most crucial to save.
The lemurs at this zoo are being saved in part because of a well-financed program to rescue rare fauna of Madagascar. By contrast, although St. Louis has kept lion-tailed macaques since 1958, other zoos started getting rid of them in the 1990s because they can carry a form of herpes deadly to people. With only an aging population left in captivity in the United States, a species advisory group to North American zoos is expected to put the animals on a phaseout list soon.
If there are criticisms, they are that zoos are not transforming their mission quickly enough from entertainment to conservation.
“We as a society have to decide if it is going to be ethically and morally appropriate to simply display animals for entertainment purposes,” said Dr. Steven Monfort, the director of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, part of the National Zoo in Washington. “In my opinion, that model is broken. There needs to be an explicit role for zoos to champion species.”
A balancing act
Established in 1910 and built on 90 acres, the St. Louis Zoo is in many ways archetypal of institutions struggling to adapt from a late-19th-century concept to a 21st-century crisis management center.
In their first century, U.S. zoos plucked exotic animals from the wild and exploited them mainly for entertainment value. When wilderness began disappearing, causing animals to fail at an accelerating pace, zoo officials became rescuers and protectors. Since the 1980s, zoos have developed coordinated breeding programs that have brought dozens of animals back from the brink.
The increasingly difficult challenge is to be a force for conservation while continuing to put on a show.
Jeffrey Bonner, president and chief executive of the St. Louis Zoo, said he felt that pressure.
In 2006, Bonner assembled his senior curators — each in charge of a different class of animal — along with donors and city planners to help make painful choices.
Sea lions are doing fine in the wild for now, but the zoo, which is taxpayer-subsidized, decided to spend $18 million on a new pool, expected to be completed next year. Why? Because sea lions are one of the most popular attractions and their home was decrepit. Money also had to be spent on new restrooms and extra parking, meaning that stated priorities like breeding space for endangered animals and a frozen pool for walruses were shelved.
“We are always balancing the public experiencing with conservation needs,” Bonner said. “If you ask me why I have camels, I would say that we need something interesting for people to see at the back of the zoo in winter, and they are always outside.”
Zoo-by-zoo approach
Currently, there are 214 accredited zoos in the U.S., from tiny eight-acre attractions to world-renowned destinations like the San Diego Zoo, whose annual budget approaches $200 million. The main organization binding these zoos is the Association of Zoos & Aquariums. Since 1985, it has been setting higher standards, raising the bar for animal care, conservation in the field and cooperative breeding programs.
But while the association can remove accreditation, which it does from time to time, it has little other enforcement powers. So decisions on just how conservation-oriented to be — from how many imperiled animals to save to how much money will be spent on species still in the wild — are largely made zoo by zoo.
As standards for animal care rise and zoos install larger, more natural-looking exhibits, there is room for fewer animals. In the 1970s, the primate house in St. Louis held 36 species of monkeys and apes. Now it has 13.
And that narrowing of the species list is likely to continue for another reason. Zoos have come to understand that for animals to reproduce successfully without inbreeding, they need to maintain much wider gene pools for each animal. There are 64 polar bears in captivity in U.S. zoos, far short of the 200 considered optimal for maintaining the population over 100 years. So zoos have been adding to the numbers of some species while culling others at the same time. St. Louis says it houses 400 more animals but 65 fewer species or subspecies than it did in 2002.
How the shrinking slots are allocated is becoming more considered and scientific. As conservation pressures mounted in the 1990s, the association began putting together advisory groups of zookeepers that look across entire families of species and advise on which ones should be made priorities and which ones should be phased out.
All sorts of criteria are considered, including uniqueness, level of endangerment in the wild, importance of the animal’s ecological role, and whether there is an adequate population in captivity for effective breeding.
With fluorescent yellow eyes and tufts of hair sticking straight up behind their ears, Bonner and Etienne look like slightly crazed old men.
These riotous and chatty lemurs once ranged across eastern Madagascar. Now scores of these black-and-white ruffed lemurs are being bred here at the St. Louis Zoo and at other zoos across the U.S. as part of a broader effort to prevent their extinction.
But Ozzie, a lion-tailed macaque, will never father children. Lion-tails once flourished in the tops of rain forests in India, using their naturally dark coloring to disappear into the height of the jungle. Though there are only about 4,000 remaining in the wild, not one among Ozzie’s group here in St. Louis will be bred. U.S. zoos are on the verge of giving up on trying to save them.
Difficult choices
As the number of species at risk of extinction soars, zoos are increasingly being called upon to rescue and sustain animals, and not just for marquee breeds like pandas and rhinos but also for all manner of mammals, frogs, birds and insects whose populations are suddenly crashing.
To conserve animals effectively, however, zoo officials have concluded that they must winnow species in their care and devote more resources to a chosen few. So zookeepers are increasingly being pressed into making cold calculations about which animals are the most crucial to save.
The lemurs at this zoo are being saved in part because of a well-financed program to rescue rare fauna of Madagascar. By contrast, although St. Louis has kept lion-tailed macaques since 1958, other zoos started getting rid of them in the 1990s because they can carry a form of herpes deadly to people. With only an aging population left in captivity in the United States, a species advisory group to North American zoos is expected to put the animals on a phaseout list soon.
If there are criticisms, they are that zoos are not transforming their mission quickly enough from entertainment to conservation.
“We as a society have to decide if it is going to be ethically and morally appropriate to simply display animals for entertainment purposes,” said Dr. Steven Monfort, the director of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, part of the National Zoo in Washington. “In my opinion, that model is broken. There needs to be an explicit role for zoos to champion species.”
A balancing act
Established in 1910 and built on 90 acres, the St. Louis Zoo is in many ways archetypal of institutions struggling to adapt from a late-19th-century concept to a 21st-century crisis management center.
In their first century, U.S. zoos plucked exotic animals from the wild and exploited them mainly for entertainment value. When wilderness began disappearing, causing animals to fail at an accelerating pace, zoo officials became rescuers and protectors. Since the 1980s, zoos have developed coordinated breeding programs that have brought dozens of animals back from the brink.
The increasingly difficult challenge is to be a force for conservation while continuing to put on a show.
Jeffrey Bonner, president and chief executive of the St. Louis Zoo, said he felt that pressure.
In 2006, Bonner assembled his senior curators — each in charge of a different class of animal — along with donors and city planners to help make painful choices.
Sea lions are doing fine in the wild for now, but the zoo, which is taxpayer-subsidized, decided to spend $18 million on a new pool, expected to be completed next year. Why? Because sea lions are one of the most popular attractions and their home was decrepit. Money also had to be spent on new restrooms and extra parking, meaning that stated priorities like breeding space for endangered animals and a frozen pool for walruses were shelved.
“We are always balancing the public experiencing with conservation needs,” Bonner said. “If you ask me why I have camels, I would say that we need something interesting for people to see at the back of the zoo in winter, and they are always outside.”
Zoo-by-zoo approach
Currently, there are 214 accredited zoos in the U.S., from tiny eight-acre attractions to world-renowned destinations like the San Diego Zoo, whose annual budget approaches $200 million. The main organization binding these zoos is the Association of Zoos & Aquariums. Since 1985, it has been setting higher standards, raising the bar for animal care, conservation in the field and cooperative breeding programs.
But while the association can remove accreditation, which it does from time to time, it has little other enforcement powers. So decisions on just how conservation-oriented to be — from how many imperiled animals to save to how much money will be spent on species still in the wild — are largely made zoo by zoo.
As standards for animal care rise and zoos install larger, more natural-looking exhibits, there is room for fewer animals. In the 1970s, the primate house in St. Louis held 36 species of monkeys and apes. Now it has 13.
And that narrowing of the species list is likely to continue for another reason. Zoos have come to understand that for animals to reproduce successfully without inbreeding, they need to maintain much wider gene pools for each animal. There are 64 polar bears in captivity in U.S. zoos, far short of the 200 considered optimal for maintaining the population over 100 years. So zoos have been adding to the numbers of some species while culling others at the same time. St. Louis says it houses 400 more animals but 65 fewer species or subspecies than it did in 2002.
How the shrinking slots are allocated is becoming more considered and scientific. As conservation pressures mounted in the 1990s, the association began putting together advisory groups of zookeepers that look across entire families of species and advise on which ones should be made priorities and which ones should be phased out.
All sorts of criteria are considered, including uniqueness, level of endangerment in the wild, importance of the animal’s ecological role, and whether there is an adequate population in captivity for effective breeding.
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