The Rising Cost of Conservation

Blame it on a childhood steeped in The Muppet Show and the New York Times, but I have frogs on the brain for the second week in a row.

NYT's Cornelia Dean wrote a fascinating story arguing where frogs may herald yet another disturbing trend in conservation biology. Increasingly, scientists are talking about ways to take entire populations of animals out of the wild and put them in zoos to avoid extinction. In this case, it's the tiny spray toads of Tanzania. The problem was that the little guys had a minute range that fell smack in the middle of a planned hydroelectric dam.

This is not the first time we have had to move an entire species and it won't be the last. The most famous case was with the iconic California condor. Biologists took the entire population of a few dozen birds out of the wild, bred them, and have been slowly releasing them for almost two decades now.

It worked well, but it was phenomenally expensive. The American Ornithologists' Union estimates it costs $5 million a year to keep a wild population of 150 birds limping along. And despite the program's mountain of good press, the Union concedes these closely watched condors are "little more than outdoor zoo populations."

Now consider that condors are relatively easy to raise in captivity. Sure, we had to learn a lot about mating habits and how to keep them from choking on trash, but essentially they are like big vultures, who are about as hard to raise as pigeons. This may not work next time. Take the ivory-billed woodpecker (once called the "Lord God Bird" because it was so big) that once was widespread throughout Southeastern swamps. It has likely gone extinct, but persistent claims from Cornell University say it is still alive in the Arkansas bayou.

If it is, can we pull a spray frog maneuver? Swoop in and put them all in zoos? The answer is no. First, we can't even find them in the mess of tangled swamps. Even if we could, large woodpeckers are notoriously hard to keep alive, according to experts at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Is this the reality we are left with? Save the zoo-friendly species and let the more finicky (read: expensive) ones go? Of course, there may be shades of gray. For instance, a buzz-phrase in conservation biology today is "assisted migration," which means catching animals and moving them somewhere they might have difficulty finding on their own because of human interference. It basically skips the part where they go to the zoo.

This might work for salamanders and wolverines, but certainly not for, say, caribou that are struggling to patch together their continent-wide migrations. For them the only affordable plan of action may be to patch together enough open land through parks, easements, and creative lease agreements that set aside habitat. These "wildlife megalinkages" are currently in vogue with groups like the Nature Conservancy, which is scrambling to take advantage of current low prices for land.

Thankfully for the spray frog, they are little and cost-effective to care for, once we get the hang of it. They are susceptible to the chytrids that I wrote about last week, but barring an epidemic they may be released back to Tanzania someday. As for the rest of the marvelous diversity of this little planet, we will just have to wait and see.

To volunteer with California condors through U.S. Fish and Wildlife email joseph_brandt@fws.gov. To volunteer with nest monitoring of captive animals try the Santa Barbara Zoo at esandhaus@sbzoo.org. Please share any other wildlife volunteer organizations that you have had positive experiences with.

Photo Credit: U.S. Fish Wildlife Service digital library and Birds of America by John James Audubon