Zoos & Aquariums Final

Translocation

movement of living organisms from one area with free release in another area. Introduction, reintroduction, reinforcement.

Translocation success predictors

Taxonomic class of the species under consideration, reproductive potential of the species, location of release compared to original habitat (historic range), legal status of the released species.

Assisted migration

Currently being debated as something that can be incorporated into conservation / management plans to help species with low dispersal ability or that are otherwise sensitive to climate change to cope with future range shifts.

Rehabilitation

Process by which naive animals are trained to live in their natural habitat (which needs to take place before they can be released into the wild.

Biomedical research

primate colonies established in new, similar habitat for biomedical research purposes

Nuisance animals translocated

Town dump has a lot of bears - not eating regularly on land since they need seals. They’ll try and trap them to intercept before they get to town. Polar bear jail - if they keep coming back. Make it a negative experience so they don’t come back.

Increase success

• Use multiple sites for translocations

• Maximize the number of transplants

• Reintroduce species over several successive years at the same site.

Theoretical considerations of reintroductions

Social groups, ecological setting of release (why they weren’t there already), genetics of population (risk of inbreeding).

Millenium seed bank project

Royal Botanical Gardens, goal is to conserve 25% of 250 000 plants in seedbanks by 2020. Provide people with knowledge.

ESUs

Was originally aimed at identifying populations with adaptive variation. ___ are now defined based on their genetic distinctness, which results from reduced or absent gene flow between them and other populations. ___ are identified through neutral genetic markers, which actually tells us nothing about the adaptive significance of any potential genetic differences.

Ecological setting for release

Determined reasons for species decline, assess populations life history in a natural setting

Genetics of population

Risks of inbreeding and outbreeding depression, past bottlenecks can impact present Ne, conservation management - maintain / restore evolutionary and ecological processes, translocations = artificial gene flow, IUCN guidelines prohibit geneflow between ESUs and other populations of species.

Problems with translocations

1. Allocation of resources

2. Dispersal of release animals

3. Environmental carrying capacity

4. Conflicts with humans

5. Ecological disruptions

6. Post-release monitoring problems

7. Captive-reared organisms can be unfit in the wild

Conservation translocation

The deliberate movement of organisms to a new location to help conserve species and ecosystems. Reintroductions, reinforcement, assisted colonization, ecological replacement.

Assurance colonies

captive populations of animals maintained for conservation purposes, especially to preserve genetic diversity

Population Viability Analysis (PVA)

A method used in conservation biology to assess the risk of extinction for a population or species, and to predict its future status. Blanding turtles’ population size target was 100-150 breeding adults by 2040, and developed the head-starting strategy.

Cooperative management strategies

Due to limited space, human and financial resources available, ____ for dealing with captive populations needs to be used. AZA Species Survival Plan (SSP) and Saving Animals From Extinction (SAFE). EAZA has European Endangered Species Programme (EEP). Comprehensive approach that ensures captive populations have the best chance of fulfilling their conservation potential.

Dusky gopher frog

500 IU hCG and 15 ug GNRH subcutaneously morning of collection. Spermic urine collected every 30 minutes for a 3 hour. Stored refrigerated. Assisted Reproduction.

Reintroduced in natural range?

Environmental sustainability

Reducing ecological footprint and use of natural resources

Green initiatives

actual activities and implementation in reducing overall footprint

Future direction for sustainability in zoos

Sustainability is very expensive and difficult to complete logistically and ethically. Carbon-neutral zoos and AI-driven conservation solutions.

Animal welfare vs. sustainability and technological advancements.

ICEnergy Systems

offsets electricity use to off-peak hours, powers air conditioning in Caribou Cafe. Does not reduce energy consumption, but offsets use of electricity to daytime peak to off-time off. We help with technology sale - testing in zoos.

Geothermal

reduce carbon emissions by 230T annually, use of renewable energy makes habitat carbon neutral.

Wasn’t tried widely yet. 1.3 million people come to the zoo, this is a guest experience - go in and touch the system. Creates heat in habitat states. ___ maintains habitat space and educates. Make carbon neutral - generate renewable energy for the Ontario hydro.

VFDs

Different systems, modulate use of motors, which are designed to be on or off, power can now be 25% to 50% to whatever % off.

Water heater

Heats as it gets there, doesn’t hold the hot water. Cool and heat while on demand. No misused electricity.

High-efficient boiler

Retrofitting system is very efficient. Designed and built for our building. Wide range needing accommodations. Reduces margin of error. “you have 95% reduction” → “treat it as 80%”

Fibration media

Recycled glass media, reduces water consumption, energy consumption, and waste.

We use glass medium, filter it. Once transition to glass, we never have to replace it, we just fix it up (cheaper). Sand compacted creates holes, which reduces filtration capacity - stop nitrogen cycle.

High-Efficient technology

air-source heat pumps, 162 tonnes reduction in emissions, 87% reduction in natural gas consumption

Adopted heat pump technology - sucks up heat energy and release it, using electricity and not natural gas. Energy can be generated in multiple renewable energy forms. 5 electric heat pumps can run entire tropic pavilion. Expecting an 82% gas reduction, we hit 97%. Increases welfare, lowers hydro bill, sustainability.

2.8 MW solar array

powers 330 homes, reduces carbon emissions by 1284 MTCincinnati zoo, end of last year - installation of solar panels, it is now carbon neutral - could power 330 homes. We’re going to improve efficiency of buildings we have, large scale solar implementation is the only way we can reach net zero. PVC - photo, newer generation of solar panels up there. Thermal photo cells (panels) - old type, heats water running through the system. The workers need to shower - 187 people taking a shower at the end of shift in 4 hours - need to leave uniforms home - shouldn’t be bringing any potential diseases home.

Water conservation

Rain capture (21 000 L cistern, 81 000 L reduction), elephant trek (Cincinnati zoo net zero water, 1M gallon rain collection and storage), floating wetland (5% surface area coverage, improve water quality, use greywater)

LEED

Leadership in energy and environmental design, standard practice for all construction. Net-zero construction, certification process, get building certified to sustainable threshold. More natural, nature based solution, with newer stuff. Energy efficient homes so energy is saved from the very beginning. ___ good for large scale building. Not at Toronto Zoo, but rather at the Cincinnati zoo - rule to get any building to be certified at ___ gold standards. They hit platinum.

Greenhouse Retrofit

40% reduction in energy consumption, 64T reduction in GHG emissions.

Reduce with natural stuff, tackling things one at a time and making huge headway.

Waste management

Movement towards circular economy, partnerships with Coca Cola, diverse practices in waste managements (Gorilla on the Line), green initiatives (sustainable palm oil, eco-friendly visitor experient, gree transportation).

Circular economy

We will eliminate landfill. Our product will deteriorate and die. Recycling over and over again. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Green transportation

Electrification projections of zoo fleet doesn’t help much with commuter numbers though

SARIT Micromobility - 3B partnership

Phone apes

Amount of stuff mined in the Congo has destroyed the ape habitat. With recycling it can be reused.

Public education

Green visitor program (recycling), public awareness campaigns (phone apes), partnership with school and conservation groups.

Nature-deficit disorder

Way of viewing a problem, human costs of alienation from nature - diminishes use of sense, attention difficulties, and higher rates of illness. Not individuals, can affect everyone.

Ecophobia

A feeling of powerlessness to prevent cataclysmic environmental change.

Guardians of wild strategic plan

Connecting people, animals, conservation science, and traditional knowledge to fight extinction. A world where people, wildlife, and wild spaces thrive.

All AZA zoos see over 200 million guests annually. More people know, more people try to help.

Conservation education mission

Toronto Zoo will engage communities by providing the tools and knowledge to connect to nature and protect our natural world

Ways to make behavioural change

• Zoos need to be market themselves as an important resource for their local communities

• Zoos should train interested staff members to act as educators

• Zoos need to tailor their programs to the specific types of visitors they get

• Zoos need to come up with specific conservation activities for its visitors to participate in

Zoo in-situ examples

Heidelberg Zoo helped establish an organization that trains staff from other organizations as part of long-term protection of endangered primates in West Africa

Chester Zoo purchased a bus for rural schoolchildren to use to visit wildlife areas in Kenya and learn about the environment and conservation

Buenos Aires City Zoo, in an effort to get the local community involved in the conservation of a native wolf that is declining, started educating the public about the wolf and its threatened status

Werribee Open Range Zoo asked students to develop wildlife education resources that could be used for Zimbabwe conservation education

Behaviourism

Teacher centred, learning occurs through external influences and memorization

Some sort of reinforcement of behaviour - like tests or quizzes. Classical and operant conditioning.

Constructivism

student-centred learning occurs through guided experience and exploration

Group work, problem solving, participation. Science class works together to test the hypothesis. Increasing the shift to student centred learning. Even in math. Better cognitive skills.

Through the processes of accommodation and assimilation, individuals build (construct) new knowledge from their experiences. Assumes that individuals have previous conceptions of the world that form their reality, whether right or wrong. Taking prior knowledge and applying it to what is happening in front of you.

Faced with new knowledge

Conflict buried, conflict faced, conflict deferred

Typically in constructivism

Authentic science

get everybody to be a scientist. Frogwatch and turtle tally - learn to identify and track, just as you would with iNaturalist. Need to know the frogs in real time. Not just memorizing, really connect and take information more memorably.

Contextual model of learning

Personal context + socio-cultural context + physical context = zoo experience

Visitor taxonomy

1. Personal curiosity (explorer)

2. Desire to facilitate other’s needs (facilitator)

3. Desire to see and experience place (experience seeker)

4. Specific knowledge-related goals (professional/hobbyist)

5. Seeking contemplative or restorative experience (recharger)

Recharger

Seeking contemplative or restorative experience - to feel refreshed, focused, appreciative

Professional/hobbyist

Going to the zoo because it relates to work or something that I’m actively invested in. Specific-knowledge related goals.

Experience seeker

Go to the zoo because it was an attraction or thing to do in the community. Going for its reputation.

Facilitators

Others in the group would benefit from going to the zoo and they bring them

Explorer

Going to the zoo out of personal curiosity - is interested and though they would like it

Key principles of interpretation

Provoke (I’m curious), relate (I understand), reveal (I care)

Types of education

Formal (instruction at school), non-formal (organized educational activity), informal (lifelong process, daily experience)

Steps to stewardship

Curiosity → awareness → understanding → caring about → caring for

This is the concept of taking care of or action for something.

From place to purpose

We are zoo funded by guests, species matter. Transition into very good conservation science organization.

Zoological medicine

The European College of Zoological Medicine (ECZM) is a European veterinary specialist college formed under the auspices of the European Board of Veterinary Specialisation. Avian medicine, herpetological medicine, small mammal medicine, wildlife population, and zoo health management.

Professionalization

We are making it possible to have people be better professionals, really make something out of it

He did a masters research project on anaesthetic risk - humans only have a 0.00005-0.1% chance of death, while cats and dogs are up to 0.3% chance, horses are 1.0%, while great apes have a 1.35% chance.

Wildlife health impacts

• Not about

  • Making wild animals “better” or the individual animal (too close to domestication)

  • Eradicating diseases or pathogens

  • Limited to infectious diseases

  • Limited to veterinarians

• Is about

  • Preventing biodiversity loss due to disease

  • Reducing health and welfare risk to wildlife from people

  • Building an international cadre of wildlife health professionals

  • Establishing global centres of excellence in wildlife health

  • Pathogens and host conservation in a healthy dynamic. Limiting catastrophic events

One health

• How health of everything (species, environment, us) is intrinsically linked

• 14 million birds across Dehli and they were decimated very quickly due to a drug used in cattle (anti-inflammatory). Hiding a toxin - they got hemophilia and died within days.

• Side burials stopped working, no vultures would come eat. Roaming dog population exploded - increase in dog bites and disease

• Emergency response - brought birds into proximity (pairs to breed). Establish normal blood results.

• Neurological issues with birds from captivity - had crazy bird flue. Neurological development slowed in captivity

• Show wild vulture to captive vultures

Biobanking

• Preserving genetic material. Wasn’t the way to be spending money - they thought we should just focus on what’s in zoos, but we’d lose the races if we did it that way

• Gene editing might be crazy, can’t adapt in this lifetime though

• 35 year frozen sperm was inserted into female - extended the lifespan of the animals

Dr. Corsen White

1920s. She found some of the monkeys in captivity were developing chronic diseases - multiple fractures they couldn’t recover from

• She wanted to find a nutritional problem relating to these issues. She fed them to rats and rats developed the same disorders.

• We discovered vitamin D in cod liver oil and they stopped eating their mates and saw similar results of healing.

• Developed a zoo cake - lots of animals ate the same thing - gaining vitamins and minerals, widespread different species.

1930s-1940s

Fur farming industry really boomed, taking care of a lot with significantly different pressures. Get animals to an age they can be humanly euthanized.

Adding pet food and commercialization. Further research helped and the understanding of amino acids did. Starting to bring animal in specifically for research

1950s-1960s

More interested in improved health, disease resistance, nutrient requirement, and economic feeding (least cost)

1970s

TZ first to hire a nutritionist, then the Smithsonian zoo followed suit setting the precedent. 1980s is when it started to be more common and have.

Fundraising ZWNF

Good for training of the next generation of zoo nutritionists. No proper accreditation, but there is a residency necessary. Toronto Zoo trained one in 2020. Very small field, but is a pathway to increase training.

IUCN One Plan Approach

An ecologist and a nutritionist may not have the same background, but may be able to integrate ideas for full coverage. In-situ and ex-situ important. We want viable populations thriving in a health ecosystem as the main goal.

Current zoo wildlife nutrition

Ecology, evolutionary ecology, comparative physiology, scientific literature, observations from the wild

Circulating metabolites

Active and wild species. Fixing vitamins. Led by zoos, how we can better feed animals, essential nutrients, alter diets to improve.

VIM Knowledge Gaps

BW & Body Composition (prior to hibernation), wild type diet, captive diet). We don’t know how fat marmots need to get to make it through winter.

Ex-situ health

• Increased body condition - breeding population is fatter than other marmots (cardiovascular diseases)

• Captive and wild born pups were different in their survival or mortality in first hibernation. Shortened hibernation in captivity (5-week difference). Hibernation and breeding success was 20%.

Hibernation

• They drop core body temperature, heart contractility. Drop body temperture possibly due to protein in heart, regulate calcium, heart cell difference.

• When you add poly-unsaturated fatty acid, it can remain fluid at lower temperatures. Can’t stack close - more favourable ratio. High PUFA and Omega 6.

Fatty Acid

Sample VIM

huge variation in season bias (only 1 fall sample), locations/different plant families changed strategies, females don’t care how fat they get they just keep eating. What nutrients are there from spring to fall. Likely some bias - stayed in one location. Currently setting up, ready to analyze.

Next steps of Vancouver Island Marmot

Look into stable isotopes. What proportion of the things they’re eating and when. DNA barcoding species doesn’t give us huge amounts or numbers, just what is there. What, not proportion. They want to gather wild data and looking at more feeding trails. Look into the real species with improved FA diet (hibernation, FAs blood & WAT, cardiovascular endpoints, bodyweight/composition).

Rethinking captive breeding

Minimize generation of species spent in captivity, identify the main goal, come up with clear criteria to identify viable populations for conservations and publish these criterias

Trigger approach

Focuses conservation efforts on species that are evolutionarily distinct and also at high risk of extinction. Another trigger prevents extinctions by conserving any sites which are the last refuge for one or more EN or CR species.

IUCN Position Statement

1. Care, knowledge, and management of ex-situ and in-situ populations of animals, fungi and plants and their environment

2. Health and pathology

3. Conservation translocations

4. Ethical research, science and data

5. Working with communities

6. Capacity building and resources

Toronto Zoo Reverse the Red Hub National & Global

Global movement that ignites strategic cooperation and action to ensure the survival of wild species and ecosystems

• Halt extinctions

• Reverse declines shown on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species

• Restore populations

• Doing extensive work with bats. 8 in Canada, most suffer from white nose syndrome making them endangered. 5 year partnership program. IUCN conservation hub, and other species.

Field conservation

safe programs, saving animals from extinction. Work with ex-situ and safe programs do stuff to save it in the wild. US, Indonesia, South Africa, and Canada.

Mission-Focused Research

the more we learn, more publishing we do, more information sent around the world

Toronto Zoo 2034 Strategic plan

Community funded conservation science organization operating a world class zoo.

Objectives of Conservation Social Science

• Gain understanding of conservation social science and why it matters

• Examine how human behaviour and conservation messaging interact

• Look at tools and strategies to increase effectiveness of conservation outreach goals

• We want to influence and gather attitudes

Intuition

Favours coherence over ambiguity, may cause us to be illogical, evolutionarily logical.

• Tends to fall into emotion. If we process everything critically we wouldn’t be able to fulfill daily task.

• Choose 1 million pennies today or 1 today, 2 tomorrow, 4, 8, 16. We can’t intuitively understand exponential growth.

Persuasion and manipulation

influence the attitudes or behaviour of individuals toward the interest of initiator. Manipulation involved ill-intent.

Changing attitudes

Spontaneous - more passive and in a positive environment. Get to see animals close up. Get the message across.

Thoughtful - cognitive elaboration, how does it relate to worldview, connects more to goal

Cognitive dissonance

Feeling of discomfort while contemplating conflicting ideas, can motivate us to change. Create when we get them to contemplate conflicting ideas. We can accept or reject.

Psychological reactance

Strong emotional response experienced when our freedom of choice is removed. Can occur when message is delivered in an overbearing way. Can lead to engagement in opposite behaviour. Richard Dawkins “you can’t honestly believe that” - said to someone who honestly believed that.

Emotional numbing

(bumming people out) - sometimes inherent for difficult topics, inundating people with too much concern leads to emotional numbing, apocalyptic analogies may elicit apathy. Well, there’s nothing I can do anyways.

Framing

A description, analogy or story which helps to give meaning to message - Storytelling is effective for scientific communication. Hook, problem, climax, connect the dots, end. Don’t just spot facts.

Behavioural change stairway model

active listening → empathy → rapport → influence → behavioural change

Don’t skip steps

Theory of planned behaviour

Identify existing belief systems. Identify attitude toward behaviour, they may wonder about subjective norms. Attitudes and behavioural controls. People think it’s natural for cats to hunt birds. Address one or more belief system, maybe compare domestic cats to a tiger.

Doomsday Vault

To preserve the worlds vital crops in case of catastrophe. Global species populations. National biobanking system. -18 degrees.

WAZA

Over 700 million visitors a year. Over 350 million USD a year for in situ and ex situ conservation. 3rd major contributor to conservation after natural conservancy and WWF. We CAN and NEED to do more. If every zoo gave 2-3% of their operating budget to conservation, it could be 1 billion USD a year.