Woodland Park Zoo Blog

Posted by: Alejandro Grajal, PhD, President and CEO Last week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk detailed his goal to make humans a multi-planetary species. He believes, as do I and many scientists, that humans are at a crossroads. Life on Earth as we know it is headed to its sixth extinction event. He says we can stay here and face the consequences, or we can become a space-faring species. Hanging out on Mars would be a handy option when Earth gets too crowded and its resources too depleted. His vision is we should build a highway to Mars now and begin colonizing, and he wants the whole world involved. Clearly, such out-of-the-box thinking gets attention and investment. It certainly gets my attention. Not necessarily because I agree or disagree with Musk. I must admit that whether we should colonize Mars is not a question that keeps me up at night. The question that does keep me up at night is this: How can we do more to save the planet we’re already on? Rather than make humans into a mult

Posted by: Bobbi Miller, Field Conservation, Woodland Park Zoo and Kae Kawanishi, PhD, MYCAT Saving tigers is a complicated business. It’s not enough for researchers and conservationists just to know where the tigers are. Saving them requires knowing how many there are, where and how they travel, what their prey base is, how to sustain them and what the imminent threats are to their survival. From this vast database of knowledge comes one obvious fact: the tigers need to have a place to live and a way to safely move from place to place. Enter Woodland Park Zoo Wildlife Survival Fund partner Malaysian Conservation Alliance for Tigers (MYCAT) and their recent Rewilding of the Sungai Yu Reforestation project. The project is a component of the Sungai Yu Tiger Corridor Conservation Program, which is striving to return wildlife and forests to the Sungai Yu tiger corridor in Peninsular Malaysia. During her doctoral work, Kae Kawanishi, MYCAT General Manager and Head of Conservation, ide

Posted by: Alissa Wolken, Communications Photo: Dennis Dow. Imagine coming face to face with a giraffe, waking up to a lion pride right outside your bedroom, or watching as a skilled veterinary team heals an injured rhino out in the field. Kenya’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy—one of the beneficiaries of the American Association of Zoo Keepers’ (AAZK) upcoming Bowling for Rhinos event—is home to many life-changing experiences that have strengthened the resolve of AAZK members to keep fighting for wildlife. An injured rhino gets a helping hand thanks to the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy field team. Photo: Dennis Dow. Bowling for Rhinos offers an opportunity for you to join that fight. All funds raised from the event go directly to rhino conservation in four locations: Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (LWC) in Kenya; and Ujung Kulon, Bukit Barisan Selatan, and Way Kambas National Parks in Indonesia through the International Rhino Foundation. Open to all to attend, this year’s Bowli

Posted by: Alissa Wolken, Communications Coders and technology experts from the Seattle area—along with their counterparts in five other major cities—will join the battle against international wildlife trafficking in the first ever Zoohackathon, October 6-9, 2016. Registration is now open for interested coders, designers and project managers. Organized by the U.S. Department of State and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), the Zoohackathon is a computer coding and technology intensive event that will bring together technical gurus and subject matter experts to create applications, systems, and tools to help reduce demand for trafficked wildlife products. The Zoohackathon will build upon the U.S. Department of State’s successful Fishackathons, which have introduced new technological solutions for combating illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing. The inaugural Zoohackathon will include six AZA-accredited zoos in the U.S., U.K. and the Pacific with plans for expa

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham, Editor Just beyond Molbak's Butterfly Garden, this unassuming building is homebase to the zoo's butterfly conservation efforts. Photo: Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo. Inside the zoo’s butterfly conservation lab, I squint at the tiny larvae that somehow seem not much larger than the period at the end of this sentence. When I ask Erin Sullivan, Woodland Park Zoo collection manager and entomologist, how big they will get when they become adult butterflies, she demonstrates by pinching the gap between her thumb and index finger. “Pretty big,” she says without irony. In the world of butterflies, size is measured in pinched fingers and adult life expectancy in mere days. In the world of butterfly conservation, however, there is nothing small or short lived about our effort to restore the threatened Oregon silverspot butterfly, a native of our beautiful Northwest. Oregon silverspot butterfly. Photo: Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo. For 15

Posted by: Susan Burchardt, Zookeeper Turkey vulture Modoc at Woodland Park Zoo. Photo by Dennis Dow/WPZ. Vultures are common—found all over the world except Antarctica and Australia—and yet are frequently overlooked or misunderstood. Here in the United States we are lucky to have three species of these beautiful scavengers: the black vulture, the turkey vulture and the critically endangered California condor. Condor numbers are slowly creeping back up. Once down to 22 individuals there are now about 430 condors. The picture is a little darker in other parts of the world. Asian vulture populations are beginning to stabilize after dramatic losses in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In Africa, carcasses are being poisoned to prevent soaring vultures from alerting rangers to the presence of poachers. This with other issues has caused several species to drop to near critically endangered levels. Vultures are nature’s recyclers. Modoc takes that job quite seriously. Photo:

Posted by: Fred Koontz, PhD, Vice President of Field Conservation In my last blog post, you read a story about my recent trip to Malaysia , which included a visit to our Harimau Selamanya (“Tigers Forever”) conservation project area. As I wrote to you, I left feeling daunted at the sheer scale of resources needed to save the critically endangered Malayan tiger, yet hopeful about our collective power to save them, together. Malaysia's Greater Taman Negara Region spans 3 million acres, three times the size of Washington's Olympic National Park. Photo: Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/Woodland Park Zoo. The Good News:  Our efforts are working! Woodland Park Zoo's partnership with Panthera, the international wild cat conservancy, and Malaysian non-profit Rimba combines resources to stop the illegal killing of tigers. In just two years, rangers from Malaysia's Department of Wildlife and National Parks, with support from our team of 14 dedicated researchers have removed more

Posted by: Amy Dickman, PhD, Ruaha Carnivore Project, a Woodland Park Zoo Partner for Wildlife Lioness with cubs spotted by a remote research camera. Photo: Ruaha Carnivore Project. Lions are one of Africa’s flagship species, but their numbers have halved in the last 20 years, with around 20,000 remaining. This means there are now fewer wild lions left in Africa than rhinos. Lions have disappeared from over 90% of their original range, and now only six large populations remain. One of those is in Tanzania’s Ruaha landscape, which is estimated to hold around a tenth of the world’s remaining lions. Many lion killings in the Ruaha landscape occur for cultural reasons, where young men hunt lions in order to receive accolades, gifts and female attention from within their communities. To reduce these killings, we have been working with the Lion Guardians organization in Kenya, and adapting their model for the Ruaha landscape. The Lion Guardians approach is to select and train the

Posted by: Jim Watson, Wildlife Research Scientist, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife & Woodland Park Zoo Living Northwest conservation program Pop Quiz: Scavenger Squad Can you identify each of these typical Northwest scavengers?  Bonus points if you can name which one is the top dog (at least for a few minutes). We'll reveal the answer at the end of this story. Photo: Matt Orr. This past winter we completed the fifth year of our study to investigate the feeding behavior of golden and bald eagles at carrion using remote cameras known as camera traps. Our interest is to better understand feeding rates of eagles on carrion, which is a likely source of lead fragments that eagles ingest, eventually poisoning them.  We are working cooperatively with Dr. Matt Orr, a researcher at Oregon State University conducting similar research that emphasizes the importance of ravens in finding carrion and attracting other scavengers. Even when ravens arrive at a carca

Posted by: Fred W. Koontz, PhD, Vice President of Field Conservation Photos by: Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/Woodland Park Zoo except where noted Taman Negara National Park. Each year, I travel to Malaysia to meet with colleagues working on Malayan tiger conservation. These trips are essential for good partner communications and ensuring the zoo’s field support is effectively placed. But my most recent visit in June was something quite different. This time, I traveled to Malaysia with 13 of the nation's top tiger zookeepers in tow, including those from National Zoo, Brookfield Zoo, San Francisco Zoo and Zoo Miami, to name just a few. The group included Woodland Park Zoo tiger keeper, Christine Anne, who had been eagerly  preparing for this trip for what seemed like a long time. Christine knew this was an opportunity to see tiger habitat, learn about threats to their survival, discuss conservation solutions with tiger experts and meet local people sharing land with big cats. Equ