Parks, zoos and freezers

Sunday 3 April 2011 8:45AM

Science writer Melvin Bolton from Yeppoon in Queensland looks at the problem of wildlife conservation and some of the battles that are being lost.

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Robyn Williams: Knut is dead. Poor little polar bear -- grew up in the zoo in Berlin and seemed to be suffering stresses. He was rejected by his mother, confused by people, and was said to be put off by the presence of the public.

Knut died at the age of four last week; the life expectancy of polar bears is normally about 35.

So zoos in modern times: does one unhappy example give an indication of how they're doing, or is it unfair to be led by anecdotes? This is Melvin Bolton, a writer who lives in Yeppoon.

Melvin Bolton: I remember the first time I saw a live elephant. It was in a place called Belle Vue in Manchester and my parents took me when I was about six or seven years old. For some reason I missed out on the elephant rides and I only saw the two Asian elephants standing in their stall. They stood side by side, slowly moving their great heads and swinging their trunks in unison. The concrete floor of the stall was raised above ground level, so they probably looked even bigger than they really were. I was awestricken, but at the same time I felt sorry for them. It didn't look much of a life.

Belle Vue closed down a long time ago, but, sadly, there are far worse places around the world still keeping wild animals for exhibition. Some people think they should all be closed down, not just the bad ones but zoos of every kind. Wild animals, they say, belong in the wild. The problem with that argument, quite apart from the education and research value of modern zoos, is that for some species it is already pertinent to ask 'what wild?'

Land use is contested wherever there are human interests. And when land is converted to agriculture, let alone urbanised, it comes to be seen through different eyes. Plants that used to be wildflowers now appear as weeds. And wild creatures often can't help being pests, or more serious threats to productivity. This of course, is why we have national parks and other protected areas.

Yet even protected areas have their critics. Some people protest that it's just plain wrong to lock up land for lesser forms of life when people could be farming it. There is also the argument that protected areas in the developing world exist for the privileged at the expense of the local poor, who get locked out of useful land. In principle, it makes obvious sense to have locals sharing the benefits of protected areas, but what if there is not much to share? Not all threatened habitats can yield tons of game meat or attract busloads of wealthy tourists.

In practice, the bigger parks and reserves around the world have commonly been divided into zones so that core areas can be fully protected while surrounding buffer zones may be opened to local folk who need to gather bush materials. But supplies of firewood, thatching grass, building poles, wild fruits and honey are all susceptible to over-harvesting. With hindsight we can see how buffer zones have acted as magnets for people and livestock. When reserves become oases of wild goodies surrounded by miles of unrelieved cropland or overgrazed pasture, human settlements are likely to be clustered around the edges. Some of the finest parks in Africa and Asia have lost their buffer zones and are being eaten away by encroaching agriculture. For many years I worked as an ecologist for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, so I've seen all this at first hand.

And yet, without having the locals on side, no protected area is likely to succeed. So, more often than not, conservation comes down to being creative with public relations problems. Around the Chitwan National Park in Nepal, for instance, different breeds of cattle are being introduced. They have a much higher milk yield than the local cows so fewer of them will be needed and grazing pressure within the park ought to be reduced. This will only buy time though, if human numbers are still increasing.

At the level of individual species, the big, potentially dangerous animals are particularly hard to protect against people-pressure. So, in this sense, when conservation battles are being lost, it's often the strong that perish first. The big cats, for example, are declining in number almost everywhere. In the UK, bears and wolves were exterminated centuries ago and it seems highly unlikely that they could ever be re-established in that crowded land. European beavers, on the other hand, might just make it. In 2009, after ten years of planning and extensive consultation, a few were reintroduced into relatively quiet parts of Scotland, on a trial basis.

Yet some countries have a higher population density than Britain, and there will be many nations in that state by mid-century, especially in Asia but also in Africa. Rwanda already has a much higher population density than Britain and by mid-century the numbers will have more than doubled. Rwanda, together with the Congo and Uganda, are home to the mountain gorilla. Uganda has a wealth of wildlife and spectacular national parks but by 2050 there will be over a thousand people to the square mile; 400 to the square kilometre. The current density in Britain is about 260 per square kilometre. By mid-century many parts of Asia will have double that density and more; indeed the people of Bangladesh are already four times as crowded.

Conflicts over land use, and between people, wildlife and domestic stock, will inevitably increase over much of the world. It isn't reasonable to expect harmonious coexistence. In some cases it will make sense to build barriers, such as electrified fencing, around protected areas, but barriers can prevent seasonal movements, dispersal of individuals and other aspects of territorial behaviour in big mammals. In turn, this creates a need for more management interventions until we are trying to keep animals captive in natural surroundings. There comes a point, with small protected areas, where they cease to be viable, self-sustaining units and we might as well call them open-range zoos. In other words, the transition from wild to captive is a continuum.

The Javan rhinoceros is an extreme case in point. It once ranged over much of lowland Asia but its future now rests with about 50 individuals that still exist in a patch of forest on the western tip of Java. This is the Ujung Kulon National Park, which h offers the rhinos about 30,000 hectares of sanctuary. The area probably won't support many more rhinos so their numbers can't be much increased where they are. When a species ends up in such a precarious position, then as a wild animal left to nature, it really has no future. At best it will gradually dwindle away but extinction could come quickly with one outbreak of disease.

Conservation breeding, outside an animal's normal range if necessary, can make a difference. The World Conservation Union lists about 40 species which still survive in captivity but are considered to be extinct in the wild. Lots of things can go wrong with captive breeding and release projects, but much has been learnt in recent years. Broadly, there are three crucial things to consider.

The first is genetics. Nobody knows how much of the original gene pool is contained within the remaining Javan rhinos, but with so few left, the death of one individual could mean the loss forever of precious components. When we look at an animal, a plant or any other living thing in the wild, what we see is a survivor, an individual whose ancestral line has come through all the hazards, hardships and diseases that have been experienced throughout its existence. Countless other ancestral lines have been weeded out along the way.

We don't need to understand all the interactions of gene-types among survivors to know that we are dealing with a winning combination because that much is self evident. The more complexity we can keep, therefore, and the more likely it is that some individuals will be able to survive the unexpected, such as climate change, and carry the species long into the future. Genetic variation is the substrate of biodiversity.

The second essential is to retain the natural behaviour of animals. The genetic predispositions might be there, but there must also be opportunities for expressing them. An animal that has grown up on floorboards, for instance, can be quite unable to climb about in trees when the need arises. Young animals in the wild sometimes have a huge amount of learning to do. In enclosures this has to be provided for as far as is practicable.

A third essential, and often the most difficult to manage, is successful rehabilitation to the wild when animals are released. It may have to be a gradual process and strategies differ from one species to another. But in no case is there any point in putting animals back into the same situation that was causing their decline in the first place. If there is no secure habitat, perhaps because it's too far gone, or has become a war zone, then conservation breeding in other places may have to be maintained indefinitely. The hope in this case is that the human population will peak this century at not more than ten billion, then a slow decline, back to a more sustainable level, will be generally welcomed in the next century. Pressure on the land should then relax, although it will happen at very different rates around the world. The populations of some African countries, with a very high proportion of youngsters, will still be increasing a hundred years from now.

Coming back to the essentials of conservation breeding, stud books need to be compiled. And sometimes, at great trouble and expense, animals need to be transported between collections in order to avoid inbreeding and retain the genetic mix. This is where human fertility research might be helpful because in vitro fertilisation, IVF, involves transporting only eggs and sperms instead of entire animals. Unfortunately procedures that work with one species can be hopeless with another and the research that has gone into humans and domestic animals has not yet been applied to many wild species.

Captive breeding is almost the last ditch in our defence against animal extinctions, but zoos can't be devoted to conservation and research, no matter how much their directors might like the idea. Even the best zoos and aquaria, certainly in Australia, depend upon entrance fees for their survival. Any conservation activities must be balanced with the need to remain popular with the public. Personally, I think zoos should be popular places for a day out, especially with children, but they are extremely expensive to run, and money and space are always limiting.

I said just now that captive breeding is almost the last ditch of conservation strategy. The only measure beyond that is to preserve living material in a freezer. With the seeds of plants this is relatively easy and there is a hi-tech global seed bank deep in the permafrost of Arctic Norway. It's a lot more difficult with animals but some materials, after special preparation, can be kept alive in liquid nitrogen at minus 196 degrees Celsius. In 2004, the Frozen Ark project was launched in Britain as a registered charity. It consists of an international consortium co-ordinated from the University of Nottingham. In Australia, Monash University is involved. The aim is to collect and store DNA, living cells and, where possible, eggs, sperms or embryos from animals that are expected to disappear within the next few decades. With existing technology the aim must fall one short of recreating creatures in a Jurassic Park scenario, but some of the material could be used to maintain genetic diversity in captive collections and, at the very least, it will secure a genetic record of millions of years of evolution that would otherwise be lost with each extinction.

Of course, all this can apply only to the species that we know about. The millions of types, mainly at the microscopic level, that we don't know about could be a lot more important for human survival. But that's another story.

Robyn Williams: Which we'll tell another day. Melvin Bolton in Yeppoon, where the sun never sets, he tells me. His latest novel is The Face in the Smaller Picture.

Next week, more animals: Roger Underwood in Perth talks about Harry Butler, In the Wild.

I'm Robyn Williams.


Melvin Bolton
Author/Science Writer,


The Face in the Smaller Picture
Melvin Bolton
Ribbonwood Publications


Robyn Williams
Brigitte Seega

Comments (2)

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  • Greg Miles :

    03 Apr 2011 10:41:54am

    Mr Bolton casts a new and valuable light on the conservation debate. I have recently retired from 30 years as a Chief Ranger in one of Australia's largest and most famous national parks. It saddens me to report that in many ways the popular perception that our wildlife is safe in our parks is wrong. Many of our parks are dying a death of a thousands cuts - and not necessarily through fault of the park service. It is just that the corrosive effects of many destructive and uncontrollable management issues are overwhelming the best efforts of the Rangers. The various state park services need to think laterally and creatively if they are going to protect our growing list of Threatened Species. Broad scale community participation in captive breeding schemes is one such strategy which is mainly resisted by the Government authorities. Private funding for targeted species protection strategies within parks is another. There are many more, but until the relevant Govt. agencies break out of the old and discredited "lock it up and leave it" or "protection to extinction" mindsets, our threatened wildlife will continue to be at risk in the bush, including in our precious parks.

  • Terry Mills :

    03 Apr 2011 3:44:53pm

    On a positive note, I recently visited, with my family, an elephant refuge in Nortehrn Thailand, about 60 km out of Chiang Mai.
    This refuge provides a secure home for elephants from the logging industry, former street performers, victims of cruelty and land-mines (in Cambodia)and allows them to live a natural life with no performing or exploitation and soon after arrival it is gratifying to see stressed animals form bonds with other elephants and settle into a natural lifestyle.
    We went there as volunteers, assisting in food preparation, cleaning night compounds, bathing elephants in the river and the like.
    A very rewarding experience, living close to the animals.
    Have a look at : www.elephantnature