A Broken Trust : Ecology: Biosurvival wanted to help save threatened species. But it couldn’t even save itself. So, at least for now, breeders are going it alone.

Scott Nichols believes he is the only person in the world who has bred the rare panther anole lizard in captivity. Native to the tiny Caribbean island of Saba, the panther anole is not on any official endangered species list--yet. But experts believe it is threatened, and Nichols is doing his best to reverse that.

Nichols, 20, who lives with his family in Perris, Calif., is an unemployed animal fanatic who grew up with dogs, cats, chickens, geese, fish and a parrot. Two and a half years ago, his mother sent away for literature from Zoovival, a Clearwater, Fla., firm dedicated to the survival of threatened--but not yet endangered--animals and plants.

For $24, Nichols became a member. Shortly thereafter, he sent in $250 to buy three panther anoles. By telephone, the organization provided information on how to breed and care for them. A year ago, a dozen lizards were born; two have survived.

But it’s unclear if Nichols’ crusade will have a happy ending. A few weeks ago, Zoovival--renamed Biosurvival after a reorganization a year ago--went out of business, leaving members such as Nichols without their traditional resources for obtaining information on breeding. Some members say they have no way to purchase additional animals. Their good intentions--and, in some instances, dreams of profits from sales to other breeders--may be on the endangered list.

Biosurvival, which may be a victim of own its naivete and unrealistic ambitions, doesn’t even have enough money to mail notice of its demise to all its members.

“We’re trying to get a letter out to everybody (about 3,000 members, 300 to 400 of whom are breeders),” said Zoovival/Biosurvival founder Gregory Cunningham by phone. “We’ve got a four-page letter that’s already printed, but we don’t have the money for the postage.”

Zoovival was founded in 1989 as a for-profit venture to help individuals breed threatened species. In mid-1990, Zoovival was reorganized into two groups: a for-profit outfit called Biosurvival Inc., which sold threatened species, literature and other items to its members, and Biosurvival Trust, a nonprofit sister organization devoted to conservation projects and research.

F. Wayne King, chairman of the now-defunct Biosurvival Trust’s scientific advisory board and a University of Florida professor of wildlife sciences, describes the species that Biosurvival sought to save as “clearly in trouble. Many of them will be saved only through captive propagation. It’s unfortunate--who wants to have all the animals in cages?--but the problem is that the zoos, which are doing a marvelous job, simply can’t handle all the species that are in trouble.”

Despite such lofty preservation goals, Biosurvival and the Biosurvival Trust could not preserve themselves.

Cunningham said Biosurvival went under because a former employee stole about $30,000 worth of animals, tools and other items, leaving the organization broke and about $5,000 in debt. (Charges were not filed.) He pledged that, if necessary, he will personally repay the $5,000 (to a few members who had made deposits for animals they wished to purchase). And he predicted that within six months, he and the others behind Biosurvival will have created a new organization with similar goals.

“We want to put together another organization, learning from the mistakes of the past, and then reactivate everybody’s membership in the new organization--free of charge, of course,” he said.

But some veterans of preservation efforts caution that individual efforts to raise threatened or endangered species, no matter how well-intentioned, may be misguided.

According to George Rabb, director of the Chicago Zoological Park (also known as the Brookfield Zoo), approaches such as Biosurvival’s may eventually prove beneficial--if they are systematic, well managed and coordinated with the efforts of other conservation organizations.

Rabb said he knows of individuals who undertake the breeding of threatened or endangered species, but knows of no organizations other than Biosurvival that have promoted it.

“If they’re emphasizing the captive breeding aspect, unless it’s managed well, it may not result in good for the species, even in the short term,” said Rabb, chairman of the Species Survival Commission of the World Conservation Union, which is made up of 3,500 individuals and 600 organizations, ranging from national governments to local zoological societies.

“The program would have to be very carefully set up, but there is cause for concern that it would stimulate the idea of people adopting strange creatures with the notion that they were single-handedly going to save them,” Rabb added. “The one thing that official organizations have come to realize is that you can’t do it alone. We have to pool resources, including the specimens themselves, certainly for the long term and in some cases for the short-term sake of the species.”

Because breeders of endangered or threatened species deal with small populations, Rabb has found that breeding programs must be “truly collective and have a plan, or you’re going to run into inbreeding and less healthy species.”

Cunningham admits he didn’t have a plan of action when he created Zoovival and its subsequent incarnation, Biosurvival. “A major part of the work was setting up the scientific programs to support the breeding projects and recruiting people to do the projects. There wasn’t even a metaphor for this organization, much less a game plan. It was all total experimentation,” Cunningham said.

He had hoped to appeal to pet owners who wanted to do good; he didn’t want to be dependent on grants and charitable donations. With Zoovival, he initially attempted to cooperate with the species survival programs set up by zoos, universities and governments. But he found that because he set the organization up as a for-profit venture, it wasn’t taken seriously.

Nonetheless, by mid-1990 Zoovival had almost 3,000 members paying $24 or more for their annual memberships (which entitled them to the organization’s quarterly publications).

The organization supported its breeders with information on how to run their breeding programs and, later on, with the names of people interested in purchasing the offspring.

But the sales of memberships, animals, literature and other materials, Cunningham said, “hardly paid for our expenses and our newsletter.”

So toward the end of 1990, he reorganized Zoovival. He called the moneymaking part of the new venture Biosurvival Inc., which he ran. It continued to sell animals and literature to members and provided free advice.

Cunningham also created a nonprofit sister organization, Biosurvival Trust, directed by environmental consultant Nicole Duplaix. It was designed to sponsor research and conservation projects.

Grants to run the trust and to set up projects were solicited, but none had materialized when the organization disbanded. In addition, Cunningham said, major corporations were lined up for significant contributions and appeared eager to help.

Cunningham points to the employee theft as the major impetus to disband his organization. But it was only one of the crises that engulfed Biosurvival.

Another major glitch occurred after Biosurvival Trust was offered and accepted the chance to help manage a large conservation park in Florida’s Pinellas County, where Clearwater is located. Other environmental groups complained that Biosurvival Trust lacked the land management experience required to help the county turn 3,800 acres of undeveloped land into a biological preserve. The opposing groups created a public ruckus and a great deal of media coverage--and Biosurvival withdrew its application to help run the park.

“I think the group was sincere and honest, but their scientific advisory board was not together,” observed Jack Stowers, the assistant county administrator who offered the co-management opportunity to Biosurvival Trust. “They had a director of it, Wayne King at the University of Florida, who’s excellent. But the rest of the scientific board had not congealed. You couldn’t say there was a scientific team in place. Given another year, it might have been put together.”

In the course of being publicly scrutinized, Biosurvival Trust was also found to be prematurely advertising itself as a nonprofit group recognized by the Internal Revenue Service. Although Cunningham and Duplaix fully expected Biosurvival Trust to receive such status, it had not officially occurred.

Said Duplaix, a biologist who served as Biosurvival Trust’s executive director: “Many young nonprofits bill themselves as nonprofits because the (certification) process takes 18 months or more. It’s common practice.”

In addition, some of the group’s advertised projects were still in the idea stage, even though the Biosurvival Trust brochure made them sound like functioning operations.

A biologist known for her research on tropical otters and an environmental consultant whose clients have included IBM and National Geographic, Duplaix expects to help form another group with Cunningham and King.

“I really believe in the concept,” Duplaix said. “There are 3,000 members, a lot of interest and no overhead to run things. It’s not that things are bad or that we’ve lost interest. It’s just that we have no money to run it during this time. We want to reorganize so that the for-profit side can expand. It will be completely separate from the nonprofit side.”

In the meantime, some members in need of help with their animals have been calling Duplaix and Cunningham at their homes. Both say they have spoken daily to worried members, offered whatever advice they could and urged the members to wait for the group’s next incarnation.

Nina Scozzari, one of the members who called Duplaix at home, still isn’t sure what to make of Biosurvival’s cessation. “I guess it’s OK, but it has upset me a bit because I can’t increase my livestock,” she said.

Scozzari has purchased three Vietnamese wood turtles, six golden mantella tree frogs, two cowani tree frogs and six species of geckos (lizards) from Zoovival/Biosurvival. She has bred babies from four of her six gecko species and from her tree frogs.

Back when Biosurvival was functioning, Scozzari, a marketing director for AT&T; in Upper Saddle River, N.J., called the group often--at one point, about three times a week. She even traveled to Clearwater to check out Biosurvival’s operation firsthand.

“They couldn’t have been more accommodating or more cooperative,” she recalled. “They’ve been very knowledgeable all along.”

(Zoovival/Biosurvival had received permits to buy and sell wildlife from the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission. According to the commission’s Kyle Hill, several people called to ask about the legitimacy of Zoovival/Biosurvival, but none called to complain. He said he perceived no reason for the organization to be investigated by the commission.)

“I really respect what Biosurvival tried to do. They were a little overambitious, but certainly, they meant well and they tried,” concluded Scozzari, who is nonetheless distressed that one of her male geckos has died and she doesn’t know where she can purchase a new one.

Cunningham said he has heard similar laments from other members.

But Scott Nichols remains undeterred. His panther anoles are healthy and thriving in his Perris mobile home. And he is eager to purchase additional panther anoles to continue his propagation program. “I have the only two female panther anoles in captivity that anybody knows about,” he said, adding that Biosurvival gave him this information, as well as the information that he was the only person in the world to successfully breed the panther anole in captivity.

But he said he will just wait for the Zoovival/Biosurvival’s latest incarnation before he attempts to add to his menagerie.