Zoo Friends - ZooNooz June 2006 - The Secret life of zoos

Debate about the relevance of zoos is nothing new. In the US and Britain, such debate has become heated with various groups arguing the relative merits of zoos versus the need to commit funds to projects working with endangered animals in their country of origin.

To get a philosophical snapshot of our own zoos and to gain an understanding on a practical level of where our skills and efforts are concentrated, LISA KEEN interviews respected Curator PAUL ANDREW on a body of zoo work that is little known and understood - its secret life.

To most people, a zoo is a collection of animals, but for a curator, a zoo has to be more than that. For a curator there has to be a reason for the animal to be in a zoo which relates to the species itself.

The problem is that population management is completely invisible. People don't know that we've got computer software that carries the pedigree of every animal in this collection and that this information is available to zoos around the world.

But when we start talking to people outside of zoos, it becomes quite clear that most of them don't have any idea of what we're doing, apart from looking after a load of animals. When the visitors walk through the gate, they can see there's a collection here. We represent biodiversity in a deliberate attempt to give them some idea of just how varied life is. And then, we interpret it. Labels, graphics and keeper talks tell people about those animals and the issues facing them.

Much of a curator's job is neither of those things. It's actually putting individuals into the context of a population. We've got to manage these animals – to breed them sustainably. If there is to be any hope for some of these species on such a crowded planet, we have to make sure that we have genetically fit and fertile animals. It's not only our duty of care, but also one of our prime roles in conservation.

It’s rapidly becoming apparent that wild populations are becoming so small and fragmented that we will have to start looking at them in the same way as we look at zoo populations and start moving animals not only between zoos - which we've been doing for 30 to 40 years - but also between fragmented populations in the wild, and between zoos and the wild. Whatever their circumstances, in order to maintain healthy populations, we have to maintain genetic variation.

Take the Silvery Gibbons. This species is monogamous so it's not problematic to look after in zoos and it's fairly straightforward to manage its genetics. On Java, an extremely crowded island where everything is under pressure, we have a situation where there are a couple of thousand Silvery Gibbons but they're all in very small forest fragments.

One of the consequences of having isolated populations is that you end up with a situation where animals can no longer move freely between family groups. So you have these little populations that are very vulnerable. You lose one breeding female and suddenly a little population of 10 disappears.

Females are unable to move out of the family group to find adolescent males from other groups to set up new territories. Inbreeding becomes more of an issue and the chances of the little populations being able to accommodate or adapt fast enough to rapid environmental changes is very low.

We've reached a point where we're going to have to go in and, using zoo skills, move that female that has reached the age of six and is being displaced by the mother of the family group, and then relocate her to another patch of forest. This might be 40 km away and there could now be a small town or a busy highway directly in her path.

There is also now a change of attitude towards keeping Silvery Gibbons as pets in Indonesia. So suddenly there are a number of confiscated gibbons going into rehab programs, some of which we fund from Taronga Zoo. These rehabilitated animals are not necessarily useful or needed back in the wild at the moment, but from a welfare perspective - to re-establish them into a more natural family unit, so they're not living in a box in somebody's living room - they're put into an environment that is much closer to their social environment.

So we end up with more small breeding populations, and suddenly, we not only have a chance of moving gibbons between families in a rehabilitation centre on Java, but can also augment one of the fragmented wild populations. By understanding the demographic nature of those fragmented populations we can start moving animals to make sure they remain healthy.

Effectively we're now doing the job that nature would have done of its own accord if we hadn't built highways in the way.

Then, once we've started to move animals between fragmented populations, and established an interface between rehabilitated and wild populations, we should start looking at having a connection between zoos overseas and the rehabilitated and wild populations.

So, no longer is the Silvery Gibbon a last flutter in west Java. We can now see that we know enough about the species and have enough resources to ensure that it survives this century - and a presumed human population peak of 12 billion by 2050.

Zoos have the obvious skill of being able to look after animals and understand them to the point where welfare is not an issue. It's not like looking after a cat or a dog; it isn't a common skill. Our keepers are professionals and we curators follow their recommendations on welfare issues.

Combining the skills of keepers, specialist veterinarians, curators and behavioural biologists becomes one of the main resources of conservation work in the coming decades. The software for managing small populations has been developed in zoos and species managers are nearly always zoo staff.

Zoos are not interested in tigers surviving only in zoos. The long-term goal for all these programs is that these animals belong in the wild.

Establishing this interface between captivity and the wild, either moving individuals around in the wild between fragmented populations, or establishing "breed-for-release" programs, where you take a pair of animals from the wild, breed them and put their young back to re-establish the populations, are very specific zoo skills - and they're increasingly being required by wildlife agencies.

If we have to capture an animal, give it a veterinary check and release it, we need somebody who is skilled in animal husbandry so that we can catch it without stressing it or causing some long-term physical or behavioural trauma. We also need someone who can do a proper vet check to make sure that we're not moving a sick animal from one population to another.

These skills in looking after individual animals, putting them into the context of a population and then managing them so that the population remains genetically healthy are entirely held within zoos. They are not things that other agencies do. and the skills to do this have been developed over the last generation or two of keepers and curators.

Zoos are not interested in tigers surviving only in zoos. The long-term goal for all these programs is that these animals belong in the wild. The problem is that, in the short-term, there doesn't appear to be room for them. Their populations get to be so fragmented that they become extinct, or there is so little habitat for the larger species that, unless we intervene, their prospects are really very poor.

As a general principle, any species that is Critically Endangered, Endangered or Vulnerable, we aim to manage in a long-term assurance program.

If we look at one of these assurance programs, we talk about "90/100" - we aim to retain 90% of the genetic variation for 100 years. What we do is long term in a way that very little else is in the 21st Century. We are also completely global - in the Silvery Gibbon species recovery issue, Taronga deals with people on Java, in South-east Asia, in America, in Europe and in South Africa.

I do get a certain buzz from seeing that the population I have been maintaining for the last 10 years is still genetically and behaviourally sound and demographically sufficiently good that if someone suddenly found some habitat that was protected, we could put these animals where they no longer occur.

I think we should do everything we can to make sure that the pleasure and understanding that wildlife gives us are available for future generations. We've done enough damage; we may as well try to do a little bit of good on the way through as well.

Much of the world's megafauna doesn't have a short-term future in the wild now and unless we manage to keep these small populations ticking over, fit, behaviourally healthy and genetically sound, they won't have a long-term future either, and that's the bit that will be sad.

So I do think we can reasonably say, without the efforts of our zoos, we won't have tigers in the wild in a hundred year's time and without our efforts, the Bilby has little chances of survival in the deserts of Australia.

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