Essential Science Indicators from
Thomson
Reuters recently named the Zoological Society of
San Diego a
Rising Star in the field of Plant & Animal
Science, meaning that the Zoo had the highest percent
increase in total citations in this field from August
to October 2008. The Zoo's current record in this field
includes 236 papers cited a total of 1,609 times
between January 1, 1999 and April 30, 2009. Their
overall record in the database for this period includes
391 papers cited a total of 4,941 times.
In the third and final part of
this feature, ScienceWatch.com's Jennifer Minnick
explores the Zoo's dedication to the conservation of
animals throughout the world and in our own
backyards.
Governments and Conservationists Work Hand-in-Hand to Save
Species
Initiating and carrying out large-scale conservation projects are what the
Applied Animal Ecology Division of the San Diego Zoo's Institute for
Conservation Research—headed up by Dr. Ronald Swaisgood—is all
about, usually devoted to the recovery of species that are particularly
threatened or endangered. The Division's researchers use an arsenal of
tools to bring these projects to a successful end, including applying
behavioral and ecological studies to better enhance the recovery of any
given species in its natural habitat. These studies are applied to both
reintroduction—taking captive-bred species and returning them to the
wild—and translocation—the relocation of wild animals from one
area to another for conservation purposes.
One large-scale project Swaisgood has been involved in for years is the
restoration of the black rhinoceros to its historical ranges. As a species,
the black rhino has suffered huge declines in number, dating back to the
1960s and '70s, when the population dropped from 75,000 to about 1,600 in
about a decade or so, primarily due to poaching.
A few countries—South Africa and Namibia being the most
prominent—have the political and economic willpower to try to recover
the species. The governments not only protected the rhinos in key reserve
lands, but also tried to re-establish the population in the range from
which they had been extirpated, once the populations in the reserves had
increased enough to allow for translocation.
The problem was that quite a few rhinos were dying after being
translocated. Because no one had closely studied what was happening after
the rhinos were released, a team led by Dr. Wayne Linklater, a former
postdoctoral fellow of the Zoo, radio-collared approximately 100 rhinos
that were moved about southern Africa to monitor what they did after
release and, in so doing, learned what would make a more successful
translocation program.
Black rhinos (pictured) and white rhinos are the
same color—they're both brownish
gray!
"One of the main factors that was causing problems was fighting,
particularly by males directed at other males, or even at females and
young," Swaisgood explains. "We found, for example, that you need a larger
reserve to accommodate this kind of social conflict. They need to be at
lower social densities in the post-release environment than in the
environment from which they came. Rhinos living in a stable environment,
even though they are solitary and aggressive animals, know their neighbors
and develop relationships with them that prevent escalated fights. Throw a
bunch of them together in a new area where they start encountering each
other, they fight, they panic, they're under a lot of stress, and they take
off running—they don't stay where they need to stay for their own
self-interest. They run through the established boundary fences that were
built—crash right through them. One rhino crashed through a fence and
ran into an ecotourism lodge, fell into the swimming pool, and drowned."
One thing the research team found was that there was a critical threshold
size—the reserve had to be about 11,000 hectares to accommodate the
social conflict issues. At that size or larger, rhinos could do a pretty
good job of keeping away from each other, and adjusted to their new
habitats in relative peace.
Scent played a role in the rhino translocation project, similar to
Swaisgood's work with the giant pandas. Because rhinos have an extremely
keen sense of smell, the team established virtual scent territories in the
new habitats by collecting the rhinos' dung and spreading it around the new
site.
"The main idea behind this action was that even though rhinos are a
solitary and aggressive species that has problems with fighting, when
they're looking for a place to settle, they want to settle adjacent to
another rhino. Not in their territory, but next to it," Swaisgood says,
"This is called conspecific attraction, and the idea is that when an animal
is naturally dispersing it needs to find good habitat, and the quickest,
simplest way of finding good habitat is to find an area where their species
is already living and thriving. Other studies with other species like
lizards have shown that even solitary animals were attracted to settle next
to other animals of their species."
Spreading the dung around worked really well in settling the rhinos'
post-release dispersal problems—researchers were able to manage their
settlement patterns, and the program is going much better now, as reported
in the team's paper, "Reserve size, conspecific density, and translocation
success for black rhinoceros" (Linklater WL and Swaisgood RR, Journal
of Wildlife Management 72[5]:1059-68, July 2008).
More from the Field
Fred Bercovitch, the Institute's Director of Behavioral Biology, has some
research findings newly in print and projects just getting underway that
he's very excited about.
First up is his work with koalas in Australia, which was just published in
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology: "Spatiotemporal dynamics of
habitat use by koalas: the checkerboard model" (Ellis WAH, Melzer A,
Bercovitch FB, 63[8]: 1181-8, June 2009). "What the article discusses,"
Bercovitch explains, "is a new model for how koalas use their environment.
What we end up suggesting is that the animals can have overlapping home
ranges, but not overlapping resource use. We speculate that this is because
the koalas' social community is a lot more complex than people think, and
that koalas navigate their environments in ways we're not clear about at
this point."
Koala
"We also talk about how if you really want to design a conservation
management plan, you need to think of more than just food resources. The
big picture is that we need to include more things in our model than food
use," concludes Bercovitch.
The team is also just getting started on a partnership for elephant
conservation in Africa, which is planned for the area where Botswana,
Zambia, Namibia, Angola, and Zimbabwe come together, as probably one-third
to one-half of the elephants on the continent live in that area. The team
is going to be looking at what determines elephant movements, and how the
behavior and activity of elephants in the collection compare to those in
the field.
"Elephants need to walk and eat, so how do they know where they've been
before, or where other elephants have been in terms of resources, etc.?"
Bercovitch relates with enthusiasm. "Those are the questions we're trying
to get at, and once we discover how they know where they're going and what
it's like out in the wild, we'll can run a coordinated effort here with the
elephants in the Wild Animal Park, and determine how to modify our colony
management plan to give our elephants in captivity the best possible
quality of life. The more we try to link the collection with the field the
better the animals in the collection will have it. Nothing is static here;
we keep changing things all the time. We can try to mimic the natural
situation as best as possible, but are simply unable to duplicate it."
Plants Are Endangered Too
The Institute's Applied Plant Ecology Division focuses on "sustainability
and restoration of native ecosystems, seed science, habitat monitoring and
management, plant-animal interactions, and recovery programs for rare and
endangered plant species," according to its mission statement. Founded in
2007 and headed up by Dr. Brian Endress, the Applied Plant Ecology Division
focuses on habitat and plant restoration, not only for the sake of the
plants themselves, but also for the animals that live in them or otherwise
rely on them for survival.
One of the most challenging projects the Division has undertaken is that of
the Seed Bank. This project is a partnership with Kew Royal Botanic Gardens
in the UK, part of Kew's Millennium Seed Project, the goal of which is to
collect seeds from 10% of the world's plants by the year 2010, focusing on
areas of high biodiversity throughout the world. As San Diego County has
over 2,000 native plant species—more plant species than any other
county in the continental US—it is ideally suited for the project's
purposes. And considering all the challenges to plant life at work in the
county—including urbanization and increasing fire
frequencies—the need to preserve seeds becomes even more apparent.
San Diego County is a recognized biodiversity
hotspot with an incredibly diverse native flora.
This diversity is under constant threat from
habitat loss and fragmentation, particularly from
intensive coastal development.
For their share of the project, Division researchers are trying to collect
20,000 seeds from each species—half of which are sent to Kew and the
other half kept for the Division's research. Collecting seeds sounds easy,
but it's really not. The seeds have to be hand-collected, from several
different individuals within each target species to maintain the
population's diversity. And they can only be collected if the target
species is producing a viable volume of seeds to supply both the seed bank
and the wild population. Since seeds have to be free of debris, pests, and
fungi, many of them need to be cleaned and processed painstakingly by hand.
"It's a very high, high quality process to get a great product at the end,"
Endress explains. "We dry the seeds down to a low relative humidity to get
as much of the water out as we can while still keeping a little bit in
there for the embryo. Then they're put in the freezer. Every couple of
years we need to take out samples to germinate, to make sure they're still
viable, and some seeds don't handle that process as well as others, so we
have to keep track of that and make sure all of our collection in the seed
bank is still viable."
That's another reason to take so many samples—they don't just put the
seeds in the freezer and walk away. "We conduct important conservation
experiments on them, such as what are the best ways to germinate them,"
says Endress. "It's all well and good to collect the seeds and put them in
the freezer, but if you can't germinate them or figure out how to get them
back out into the wild there's no point—you're treading water or
worse."
Habitat for Humanity—and the
Animals
The Division has also undertaken a unique conservation and cultural
preservation project in conjunction with the Conservation Education
Division: Native Seeds for Native Americans, which aims to "renew a
connection between native plants and tribal people." So far, under the
aegis of the project, a plant propagation shade house has been built on the
San Pasqual Reservation, more than 100 native trees and shrubs have been
delivered to the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians for use in
post-wildfire restoration, and an ethnobotanical field guide of culturally
significant plants, their native names, and traditional uses has been
published.
San Diego Zoo
San Diego Wild Animal Park
Institute for Conservation
Research
Working within a socioeconomic or cultural frame of reference is something
that the Institute's researchers do often. The Applied Plant Ecology
Division is currently working to establish the first formal study on palm
harvesting in Mexico and Central America. The rationale behind the project
is to study a few representative palm species to see how they respond to
harvesting, and hopefully, to be able to make some recommendations about
palm conservation in general, so that palms can be sustainably managed,
while still allowing the local people who rely on palms for their way of
life access to the resources they need, and to help ensure healthy habitat
for any animals that live in or otherwise utilize the palms. "Working with
local communities is really important because they're the ones who use
these palm populations, and oftentimes they know more about palm ecology
than even the scientists because they live among them and know them quite
well," Endress explains.
Another project the Applied Plant Ecology Division is working to get off
the ground is in Vietnam, conserving the forest habitat of the Tonkin
snub-nosed monkey, one of the rarest primates in the world. "In January, we
went over there to assess the situation for the Asia programs, the
Vietnamese government, and other organizations that are trying to figure
out ways to promote and preserve these monkeys. A lot of the focus is on
plants, because these fairly decent-sized (50-60 pounds) primates eat
leaves—specifically leaf stems. They have a really peculiar diet and
their habitat is restricted to these high mountain forests that there are
very few of left in Vietnam," Endress relates.
"The trip was pretty interesting, and again ties in the people aspect
because the monkeys and the local communities in this part of Vietnam both
rely on the forest. Hunting is not a problem; the local communities also
rely on the forest for firewood and a lot of other subsistence and economic
reasons," Endress continues. "We have to find ways to maintain healthy
habitat for the monkeys while also providing resources for the communities.
So, much like the palm studies, we're trying to work out how we can work
with people so we have a win-win situation for them and the monkeys." The
locals are quite enthusiastic about saving the monkeys, and so Endress has
high hopes for this particular program.
Backyard Conservation
Though known far and wide for their conservation efforts in the exotic
species like pandas and tigers, the Zoo does a great deal of work in
Southern California itself. As the Institute's Director Dr. Allison Alberts
says, "Southern California is what you call a 'biodiversity
hotspot'—it's an area incredibly high in biodiversity, but it's also
very threatened with extinctions. For example, there are more species of
threatened plants here in San Diego County than in any other county in the
continental US. What's threatening them is development and urbanization,
the expanding human population, competition for water and resources, things
like that. We do a lot of work with local species, right here in our own
backyard: everything from the burrowing owl to the Pacific pocket mouse to
the coastal cactus wren, and the list goes on. And I would love to see us
become as well-known for that work as we are for our global work. People
don't tend to think of conservation as something in their own backyard, but
we have some pretty incredible biodiversity right here in San Diego
County."
Speaking of the coastal cactus wren, one of the other projects the Applied
Plant Ecology Division is involved in is the preservation and restoration
of coastal scrublands, the habitat for this particular species of wren. The
wren lives in sage scrub that contains a high abundance of prickly pear
cactus, and prefers to roost in cacti that are at least three feet tall.
The San Diego Wild Animal Park's land is host to about 900 acres of coastal
sage scrub natural habitat, but that habitat is in danger even at the Park,
due to the increasing frequency of wildfires.
Of the 1,800 acres that comprise
the Wild Animal Park, 900 are undeveloped,
consisting largely of pristine coastal sage
scrub.
"A lot of us are interested in doing cactus scrub restoration to help the
coastal cactus wren populations, which are really declining," Endress says.
"The problem is when you go around asking what the best method to restore
prickly pear cactus habitat is, there hasn't been a lot of research. So
we're trying to fill that need."
The Division is currently undertaking an experiment to determine the best
way to propagate prickly pear cactus. Cacti can be propagated by pulling
off a pad, drying it, and planting it, but the question is whether cacti
can be planted right there in the field, or if they would benefit from a
year of growth in a carefully monitored shade house? The latter method is
more expensive, but is it better for the cacti in the long run? Which
method will be best for helping the cacti attain the heights needed to
sustain the coastal cactus wren? This is what Endress and his team hope to
find out.
The lands of the Wild Animal Park, particularly the coastal sage scrub, are
also being used to study fire-recovery rates of native flora and fauna. "We
have some great information on what animals are here and the abundances,
and with the fires of 2007 we were given a terrific opportunity to look at
the relationship between abundances of native animals within the plant
habitats and structures," Endress says.
Endress and his team are working on a coordinated effort with Ron Swaisgood
and the Applied Animal Ecology researchers to examine the degree to which
active restoration helps habitats in 20 plots of land that were affected by
the 2007 fires. "Basically," Endress explains, "we divided up the plots
into two groups: one we're going to let naturally recover, and we have
native plants coming back but we also have quite a few exotics moving in,
and in the other, we're doing a combination of herbicide applications to
give native plants the advantage. What we're looking at is how the
restoration succeeds from a plant point of view, then also working closely
with Applied Animal Ecology to see how that translates to better-quality
habitats for the animals."
Swaisgood's team is also deeply involved in the restoration of the Pacific
pocket mouse and the Stephen's kangaroo rat in Southern California, in
partnership with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Just as with the larger,
more exotic animals, the principles of using ecological information and
behavioral biology for a more successful project apply.
Interestingly, the case of the Stephen's kangaroo rat paralleled that of
the black rhino, in that the team, led by Dr. Debra Shier, used scent to
mark the rats' new territory. The particular population of rats were in the
path of development and needed to be moved to a safer but still suitable
habitat. "Phylogenetically, the rats and rhinos are far apart, but
behavior-wise, they're both solitary and territorial. In terms of the
behavioral ecology there were some similarities, and they also both rely on
scent for communication, so we thought it might work with the rats as
well," Swaisgood relates, and they were right. The team collected and
spread scent around for some of the rats, but not others, because they
really weren't sure if it would work or not, and they found a higher
post-release survival in the rats for which scent had been used.
Kangaroo rats and pocket mice (pictured) are
considered keystone species that influence
ecosystem processes in desert, shrub, and grassland
ecosystems.
More than just the rhinos and the rats can benefit from these studies,
Swaisgood points out. "So what we're trying to do is use a series of
studies like this to develop an optimal translocation strategy for
species—and once we figure out which of these different theories
apply to different species we can put together protocols for how best to
translocate individuals of that particular species."
The other thing the team took into consideration with the kangaroo rats was
the cost of social disruption when moving wild animals. Swaisgood says this
cost needs to be taken into account, but often isn't. "You might think of
it with a group of monkeys because we all know how social they are, but you
might not think of it for an animal like the kangaroo rat. But again, they
have relationships with their neighbors. And in a translocation there are
many competing needs: they have to find a new place to settle, to be on the
lookout for predators, and if you add one more cost to them—that of
forcing them to develop new relationships with new neighbors—you
might actually hinder that effort. And we found that that was the case. So
what we did was translocate groups of kangaroo rats that were neighboring
at the source population and were already familiar with each other and
released them next to each other. We found that those animals thrived
better when released this way rather than random release."
The project on the Pacific pocket mouse is currently in a holding pattern.
The team intended to do a similar project to what they did for the kangaroo
rat, but they ran into the unfortunate obstacles of the 2006 drought in
Southern California—the mouse population had crashed to such an
extent that they didn't want to risk capturing more mice from the source
population to move them. Unlike the kangaroo rat, the habitat for the
pocket mice was in no immediate danger—rather, the plan for the
project was to extend the natural range of the mice. While the relocation
aspect of the project is stalled, the conservation partners are looking
into the possibility of a captive breeding program. "The mice haven't been
bred in captivity before but because the population has become so
critically low, the feeling is that we might want to establish an insurance
colony just in case something happens to that small population," Swaisgood
explains.
A similar debate occurred years ago, with the California condor breeding
program, Swaisgood mentions by way of precedent in favor of the breeding
program for the mice. "Many years ago we were down to 22 animals—we
started a breeding program and now there are over 300. We've done the same
thing with the San Clemente Island Shrike, another local species that lives
off the coast of San Diego," he adds. "We've bred and released several
hundred of those birds, and the wild population today is comprised almost
completely of animals that we bred in captivity or their offspring."
Applying Genetics to Conservation
Leading the Institute's Genetics Division, including the part of the Frozen
Zoo® that encompasses frozen tissue samples and DNA banks as well as an
extensive living cell collection, is Dr. Oliver Ryder, who has been with
the Zoo since 1975. "The success of this enormous collection," Ryder
asserts, "lies in the fact that we've been able to preserve this material
so that when new technologies become available, we're in a position to help
undertake studies or to undertake them ourselves using new techniques but
drawing on the samples that we've banked, including the living cell
collection."
Studies in the Genetics Division include a wide variety of topics, from
filling in the phylogenetic tree to DNA barcoding to helping unlock the
mysteries of the human genome. These studies address such questions as: how
different is the Przewalski's horse from the domestic horse? Or the black
rhinos of southern Africa from the black rhinos of eastern Africa? Why are
some animals not breeding—could this be due to a cryptic speciation
in chromosomal differences?
The Frozen
Zoo®
The Zoo's most-cited paper in the Essential Science Indicators
database comes from the Genetics Division: "Molecular phylogenetics and the
origins of placental mammals," (Murphy WJ, et al., Nature
409[6820]: 614-8, 1 February 2001). "This study was the most ambitious
undertaking to look at the molecular evolution of the placental mammals,"
Ryder says. With the advent of DNA sequencing technology, Ryder and his
co-authors were able to use DNA sequencing information to evaluate the
evolutionary tree of the placental mammals.
"Some very unexpected relationships were found," Ryder relates. "There's a
group of animals called the Afrotheria, which showed that tenrecs, which
are little hedgehog-like animals from Madagascar, and elephants and
aardvarks and hyraxes and manatees were all closely related—were on
the same branch, in fact, even though they had diverged enormously in terms
of their morphology. Understanding the systematics, the evolutionary
relationships of species, is really crucial to managing their conservation
efforts."
Another key project for the Division is DNA barcoding. This project came
about in part due to situations that would arise in the field, leading
researchers to realize that having reference DNA banks could be an
extremely useful tool. Thanks to tissue samples collected from gorillas in
zoos and studies performed in the field in Africa, Ryder's team was
well-positioned to help the government of Rwanda with the identification of
some orphaned gorillas: the team was able to tell, though genetic
comparisons, whether the orphans were mountain gorillas or eastern lowland
gorillas.
Similarly, field workers often request help in identifying the origins of
bush meats. Subsistence hunting has been giving way to wholesale commercial
overexploitation of wildlife in many parts of the world. Conservation
workers can use DNA barcoding technology to track this illegal trade.
"Because we have the Frozen Zoo®," Ryder says, "we're involved; we have
many of these species already documented, so we can build up this reference
database, and we also have the laboratory facilities to undertake this work
and to train people so that they can learn how to do it. We've trained high
school students, who've gotten on fire about all this, producing
documentaries and traveling to Africa and training wildlife officials about
this technology. We're bringing people from other countries to learn how to
utilize these techniques in our laboratories."
+enlarge
Sign at the entrance of the San Diego
Zoo.
The Genetics Division is also aiding the National Institutes of Health on
the Human Genome Project. "As you know, the human genome was sequenced in
2003, but in order to better understand the human genome, researchers need
to expand their understanding of the genomes of other species. For
instance, mice and humans are on the same branch of the mammalian tree,
something we know from the Murphy paper," Ryder explains, "so we need to
sample from all the branches."
"And so the NIH in its effort to understand the evolution of the human
genome is involved in determining the genome sequences of other species,"
Ryder continues, and the Frozen Zoo® has been a source of many of these
studies. For instance, the elephant genome that has been sequenced is a
female from our Wild Animal Park, and the gorilla that's being sequenced is
also a female from the Park. We're very happy to participate in those
studies because we're able to help design them in a way that is both
beneficial to the goals of their study but in ways that also contribute to
our conservation mission in that we would like to know more about the
genetic variations, for example, of endangered species of zebras."
Ryder goes on to discuss the value of these studies for the Institute. "For
instance," he says, "I'm sure you're familiar with the 'out of Africa'
hypothesis for humans, and the 'mitochondrial Eve.' Humans aren't the only
species that have that story, so understanding how the zebras or elephants
or rhinos are distributed across their range and how the gene pool is
partitioned is really important for conservation. Knowing this can help you
set up reserves or understand what historical patterns of migration or
population growth were. All of those processes can leave a kind of a
signature on the genome, in terms of its genetic diversity, and having that
information can be very useful for conservation efforts."
Another current project Ryder's group is working on is using genetics in
the field to aid the continuing restoration of the California condor. "The
condor's gene pool is really small," he says, "and condors are susceptible
to a genetic disease called chondrodystrophy. We're trying to apply the
same methods to help condors as we use for understanding genetic diseases
in humans. We're trying to map a deleterious gene to try to understand what
went wrong, and identify carriers so that we can better manage our breeding
program. Five years ago, the only genetic map for a California condor was
whether it was male or female, and now we have a genetic map with hundreds
of markers on it. Next year we hope to make it have almost
1,000—we're going to embark on a condor genome sequence so we can
better understand the biology of condors not only in terms of their
diseases but also with regard to their historic population sizes and as
they face new threats in the environment, threats like West Nile virus,
that they weren't previously exposed to."
Summing up this study as well as the work of his Division, Ryder concludes,
"The tools that we use to understand other species are, increasingly,
genetic and genomic analyses. We feel that this is just a responsible way
to ensure, as best we can, the future these species, as part of our overall
efforts."
Teaching Future Generations
Because all the Zoo's efforts would be in vain if future generations didn't
learn the value of conserving worldwide biodiversity, the Zoo runs a
variety of education programs through the Institute for Conservation
Research. These programs touch the regional, national, and international
levels. The Institute hosts postdoctoral researchers and student interns
both in San Diego and at the various field programs worldwide.
The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for
Conservation Research
The Institute works with students and community groups, teaching
cooperation and sustainability. It also runs a seminar series with diverse
topics such as the effects of dolphin shows on conservation awareness and
their impact on dolphin behavior, elephant distribution and home ranges in
Botswana, the reproductive biology of the giant panda, as well as more
local conservation issues such as monitoring the coastal California
gnatcatcher populations, and the impact of urbanization on bobcats in
Orange County.
All the staff at the Institute for Conservation Research are dedicated to
getting the word out about their projects. For instance, Fred Bercovitch
talks about putting his and Matt Anderson's bioacoustic research into a
context zoo visitors can understand, by playing the recorded vocalizations.
"If a child has ever heard a baby grey squirrel make its high-pitched
shrieking noise, we can say to the kids, 'Remember that noise? Well, some
endangered animals do that too!'" Bercovitch says.
As the mission statement of the Institute for Conservation Research says,
the various divisions are "Committed to generating, sharing, and applying
scientific knowledge vital to the conservation of animals, plants, and
habitats worldwide." From as far off as Africa to as nearby as San Diego
County, the Zoological Society of San Diego is doing its level best to meet
these goals on a daily basis.
Zoological Society of San Diego
Institute for Conservation Research
Escondido, CA, USA
Murphy WJ, et al., "Molecular phylogenetics and
the origins of placental mammals," Nature
409(6820): 614-8, 1 February 2001. Source:
Essential Science Indicators from
Thomson
Reuters.
The Zoological Society of San Diego was a Rising Star in
Plant & Animal Science in
March 2009.
KEYWORDS: ZOO, CONSERVATION, ECOLOGY, FIELD
PROGRAMS, ENDANGERED SPECIES, EXTINCTION, CALIFORNIA CONDORS,
COLLABORATIONS, PARTNERSHIPS, CONSERVATION ORGANIZATIONS, CONSERVATION
EDUCATION, TRANSLOCATION, HABITATS, REINTRODUCTION, BLACK RHINOS,
PACIFIC POCKET MOUSE, STEPHENS' KANGAROO RAT, KOALAS, FROZEN ZOO, SEED
BANK, TISSUE SAMPLES, GENETIC BARCODING, WHOLE GENOME STUDIES, PLANT
CONSERVATION, NATIVE PLANTS, EXOTIC PLANTS, SEED COLLECTION, CALIFORNIA
COASTAL SAGE, PRICKLY PEAR CACTUS, COASTAL CACTUS WREN, PALMS, TONKIN
SNUB-NOSED MONKEY, GORILLAS, BUSH MEAT.
Note: all images used in this feature are the property of the Zoological
Society of San Diego, with the exception of this
image—which was obtained from the Wikimedia
Commons.