Our visit to the new Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for Conservation Research was a journey into a world of data and scientific jargon that I have never taken before. Thanks to our accommodating hosts I was able to get by with my incomplete high school education. Well, at least I understood enough to write this journal. The journey included chats with Ph.D.s that popped out of their offices, posters highlighting research efforts all along the hallway walls, a trip to the most secure library I’ve ever seen, more types of freezers than I ever thought necessary, and the overwhelming sense that the people working in that building with all their projects and degrees are truly the brains of the Zoo. Most of our tour was conducted by Dr. Barbara Durrant, head of the Reproductive Physiology Division of the department of Conservation and Research for Endangered Species (CRES), but also included visits and presentations from researchers in her division.

Our day began as a study of opposites, not only in the contrast between the heavy labor keeper jobs we had seen and these sanitized white-robed lab jobs, but also in the two main animals being studied. There was Dr. Tom Spady’s presentation on bear research and the panda cubs that are only a minute one-tenth of one percent of their mother’s weight when born. Then there was the flightless and odd kiwi whose egg takes up a whopping twenty percent of the mother. To put that into perspective, human babies only take up five percent of the mother at full term. The goal of the Reproductive Physiology Division, however, is not to debate why such a little bird has such a big egg, but to help increase the populations by helping the animals reproduce. You may wonder, as Dr. Tom Jensen humorously put it, “Why can’t animals figure it out on their own?”

To understand why animals won’t mate you need to understand in what circumstances they will. It all comes down to a combination of environmental factors, including food, climate, and population density of potential mates and potential competitors. The conditions can be so specific like in the case of the New Zealand kakapo parrot that the animal will only breed when a certain plant flowers. Unfortunately for the kakapo, their choice plant only blooms once every four years, which makes their prospects for the future of the population sound pretty bleak considering only 60 remain in the world. Or the example of the now-extinct passenger pigeons, which would only breed if there were more than 100,000 birds in their colony. Even if a flock that size sounds like something out of a Hitchcock movie (and to me like a little too much competition), it was a cue they used to know when it was safe to mate. Then there’s the whole issue of whom the animals will mate with, which in itself can be tricky since much of it is based on compatibility and appearance. In zoos, keepers cannot always create this perfect mix of atmosphere, looks, and charm that animals need to reproduce and that is why intervention from CRES reproductive physiologists is needed.

Finding ways to help animals reproduce can be difficult when studying the endangered animals themselves can be harmful to the population. Therefore, similar model species are used for research and working out kinks in proposed methods or ideas. For kiwis, Dr. Jensen uses quails in an amazing process in which he collects germ stem cells from adult kiwis that have died, and injects these cells into quail embryos at the point in development where the cells will be incorporated into the quail reproductive system. The quail will mature and actually produce kiwi sperm. That way the sperm can be collected from the quail in a non-invasive process called “milking” and potentially used for artificial insemination of kiwi females at other zoos. They have not perfected this process yet, but as you can see, it would be easier to ship a vial of sperm than a whole kiwi around the world for reproduction.

Model species are also used with bears, and Dr. Spady studies the North American black bear. Of the eight species of bears in the world, six are endangered or threatened. Of the remaining two, polar bears and the American black bears, polar bears are excluded because of their aggression, size, range and the fact that they are on the road to being threatened themselves. Dr. Spady is presently working with the American black bear in order to better understand when female bears go into heat. By using the American black bear as a model for all bears, scientists hope to increase the reproductive success of other more threatened or even endangered bears. It is important to get a sense of the cycle because in the case of the critically endangered panda the window to impregnate the bear lasts only one to three days in a year. The Reproductive Physiology Division, along with the Endocrinology Division of CRES have actually had some good success in tracking hormones before mating, but they are now trying to improve their knowledge of what happens after conception and during pregnancy.

Dr. Spady has been using a thermal imaging camera that may be able to detect when a bear is pregnant on black bears and pandas too. Traditional methods of pregnancy testing, like checking hormone levels, do not work on pandas because pandas can exhibit something called pseudo-pregnancy where hormone levels will mimic those of a pregnant bear when the bear is in fact not pregnant. Ultrasound technology, which is successful in “seeing” pregnancy in humans, does not work in pandas because panda cubs do not gestate for very long, which makes them very small and difficult to pick up with ultrasound. The thermal camera can see high concentrations of blood vessels, which bring lots of heat to an area in the panda uterus that holds the fetus.

After absorbing more information than I had all week, I’d have to say that the Beckman Center for Conservation Research is not the place I had expected. Yes, there was equipment straight out of my biology textbook and the slightly mad scientist types, but it was not the stuffy and unapproachable environment I had imagined. More importantly, I was able to directly link their efforts to conservation because they were not solving some obscure scientific mystery that will never have any application, but helping real live animals.

Contributed by Mariah - Zoo InternQuest Conservation Team

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