New Technology Joins Battle to Save Old Species

The rare snout-nosed, delicately hooved okapis of Zaire are caught today as they have been for centuries--lured into palm-covered pits dug into the forest floor.

It is the only safe way to capture them. And it is only after they are captured that they can be fitted with high-technology radiotelemetry collars, which send signals across miles of tangled jungle to recorders that monitor the animals on the run and at rest, as they give birth and when they die.

The Okapi Project, run by anthropologists Terese Hart and John Hart in Zaire, represents everything old and new about the emerging discipline of conservation biology.

Old-fashioned techniques in bird- and animal-watching have been combined with the latest in computers, biology, genetics and technology.

“There was a period when conservation was equated with home economics by the scientific and academic communities,” said Michael Soule, a biologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who started the first peer-reviewed scientific journal for conservationists two years ago.

“Their isolation tended to prevent the diffusion of new information from other sciences,” he said. “That’s changing now. There are many advances in many fields that are applicable to conservation biology.

“It is becoming much more exact, much more accurate.”

Conservationists said it is increasingly important to turn their field--long noted for its eccentric individualists and characterized by quaint techniques--into a recognized science.

“The process of death and decline is accelerating,” Soule said. “When we go to governments, hats in hand, saying, ‘We need to put aside land for this animal,’ we have to know exactly how much land and why.”

George Schaller, director of Wildlife Conservation International, the conservation program of the New York Zoological Society, agrees.

“The research is needed as the first step to implementing conservation programs,” said Schaller, who helped establish a program to save the rare giant pandas of China.

“It’s really a new field,” he said. “The change has been going on for years, but it’s crystallizing.”

A brief survey of conservationists uncovered a number of projects designed to save animals by using recently discovered scientific and technological advances.

Scientists are examining the DNA of rhinos and gazelles to determine their long-term genetic--and therefore evolutionary--viability.

A massive project in the rain forests of Brazil is using computers to pinpoint changes in a complex ecosystem that may go unnoticed by the naked eye of conservationists, no matter how keen.

Sophisticated radiotelemetry collars are allowing scientists to determine how far animals like the giant pandas roam, a crucial piece of knowledge needed to set up reserves.

The collars are also being used to determine mating patterns, feeding habits and life cycles of a number of animals.

Plants eaten by the giant macaws of Peru and okapis in Zaire have been chemically analyzed to determine their nutritional value.

“Until a few years ago we couldn’t do things like this because we were less scientifically oriented,” said Rob Bierregaard, senior scientist on the World Wildlife Fund’s forest ecosystems project in Brazil.

For the last eight years, Bierregaard and his colleagues have been collecting reams of information about Brazilian birds, animals, plants and insects and feeding it into an IBM computer.

Their goal is to determine how deforestation affects the patches of tropical rain forest left by developers.

“The problem with the tropics is that it is so complex, it has so many variations, the patterns are beyond the vision of mortal humans,” Bierregaard said in a recent interview.

“A computer can sort through all the background noise and see subtle changes.”

Bierregaard, an ornithologist, wrote a number of the computer programs used in the project himself. But an increasing number of programs designed specifically for conservation biologists are available on the market.

“You can buy programs on the home range of animals and on bird capture records,” he said.

Another ornithologist, Charles Munn, dedicated to saving the massive brightly feathered macaws of Peru, talks computers, powerful binoculars and slingshots.

He devised the slingshots, used to project climbing equipment into 150-foot-tall trees, from equipment used in his undergraduate days at Princeton University.

“They would put a loop of surgical tubing across the window frame, put a funnel in the middle and a water balloon in that, then let loose on anyone unfortunate enough to be in the quad,” he said of his classmates.

“When I had to figure out how to get lines in trees, it sort of came back to me,” he said in a telephone interview from his Philadelphia home.

“A lot of this work is sort of old-fashioned ingenuity, mother-of-invention stuff,” he said. “But the technological advances have been a tremendous help.”

Munn does not collar his birds but watches them through state-of-the-art binoculars and telescopes while perched in trees 100 feet off the ground. His observations about their nesting patterns and feeding habits are recorded on a computer he keeps at his base camp on the forest floor.

This year, he started recording the massive birds with video cameras supplied by a businessman interested in natural history.

Plant Specimens Analyzed

Several years ago Munn collected specimens of plants eaten by the three-foot parrots and sent them to Harvard for analysis. The technique, which allows conservation biologists to understand the nutritional and fiber needs of the species they study, is becoming more and more routine.

At the Bronx Zoological Garden, nutritionist Ellen S. Dierenfeld recently showed off a clean antiseptic laboratory in the zoo’s multimillion-dollar medical center. Scientists there recently completed a massive project involving animals in the zoo and in the wild that showed many species need vitamin E to procreate.

“The research from the field has helped tremendously in the zoo in terms of saving endangered species,” said Dierenfeld, who keeps a computer list of recipes for the zoo’s 658 species of birds, reptiles and animals--75 of which are endangered and four extinct in the wild.

“It’s not enough to put down a plate of food that looks like something they eat in the wild,” she said. “Knowing their vitamin requirements, bulk, fiber, all of that, is important to keep them healthy.”

Conservation biologists said much of their research has ended up in the eager hands of zoo directors attempting to maintain and breed animals in zoos that are vanishing fast in the wild.

At the Bronx Zoo, two giant pandas on loan from China, a surly female named Yong Yong and an adolescent male named Ling Ling, are fed bamboo shoots flown in fresh from Atlanta twice a week. The pandas arrived for their six-month visit from China with a staff of three and the zoo assigned two other keepers to them full time.

Schaller, a reknowned expert on the bear-like animals, said much has been learned about their habits since they were first tagged with radio collars in the wild in 1980.

“Some animals you can watch with no problem, but in dense bamboo you can’t identify pandas and you can’t follow them easily,” Schaller said.

In radiotelemetry, first introduced to conservationists in the late 1970s, the animal is fitted with a small, battery-operated radio that sends signals to a hand-held receiver. Each animal is assigned a separate frequency, allowing scientists to distinguish and track animals without ever seeing them.

In some models, the tone and pattern of the frequencies change when the animal moves or is at rest, so scientists can monitor its activity. The newest models have built-in temperature recorders placed under the skin that can signal when the animal is in heat and when it dies.

Schaller called the collars essential to conservation efforts.

But he said perhaps the most important, and far-reaching, scientific advancement in the conservation field has been genetic engineering.

“One of the biggest changes we’ve faced has been the realization you can’t save animals like Noah did, two by two,” he said in an interview from his Connecticut home. “You need a viable population with genetic variability so that inbreeding does not create a species doomed for extinction.

“We used to say, well, 100 animals is a viable population, but that was just a guess,” he said. “Now we can look at their genetic makeup and say we need this number of animals to keep the species going.”

At the St. Louis Zoo in Missouri, scientists have saved the Speke’s gazelle from extinction by genetically testing animals in the last known herd, Soule said.

“By using modern genetic techniques, they were able to start a selective-breeding process that eliminated bad genes and varied the pool of good genes to keep the breed strong,” Soule said. “They are thriving now.”

He said another genetic project in Texas indicated that a proposed dam would split a large population of Concho water snakes into three separate populations, two of which would probably die due to inbreeding.

“That’s an example of science and conservation at work, of coming up with concrete scientific analysis of a situation instead of a hunch,” said Soule, a founder of the Society for Conservation Biology. “It is much more convincing to the governments and in the courts.”

Schaller said genetic tests will play a key role in a program to vary the matings of pandas, which are fast becoming inbred and extinct. Some of the animals will be airlifted from one area to another.

“Pandas are scattered on isolated mountaintops,” he said. “It’s necessary to transfer animals from one population to another to ensure a good genetic pool.”

At the Bronx Zoo on a recent rainy afternoon, Yong Yong stirred from her sleep in the protective branches of a tree and stretched lazily. The sparse crowd, huddled under umbrellas, cheered.

“In the end, the research is only a small step,” Schaller said. “Unless there is a commitment on the part of local people and government, the research doesn’t give us anything but knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”