Animal conservationist: David E. Wildt is the senior scientist and head of the Center for Species Survival at the Smithsonian National Zoo. (Photo courtesy of Jessie Cohen, Smithsonian's National Zoo)
This article was originally published in the American Observer.
There were only about 120 giant pandas living in zoos and breeding centers in China in the late 1990s when David Wildt, a scientist at the Smithsonian National Zoo, went to China to study how the endangered animal reproduces.
When he was there, Wildt did something he said used to be rare in the reproductive biology field, but something he said is vital to species conservation – he forged partnerships among scientists representing varied and separate scientific disciplines in order to learn more about the panda.
“If you want to make a difference, if you want to make a contribution to species conservation … you have to be a collaborator,” said Wildt.
According to Wildt, the partnerships created and the wealth of information learned through that interdisciplinary, collaborative approach helped the Chinese to increase the number of pandas in captivity to over 300 today. A number, according to the Chinese news site People’s Daily Online, that some experts believe is the minimum needed in order for the species to sustainably reproduce for the next century.
Wildt is the senior scientist and head of the Center for Species Survival at the National Zoo’s Conservation Biology Institute, where he studies the reproductive biology of animals with the aim of conserving species. He said interdisciplinary research and collaboration guides his work.
In order to breed self-sustaining populations of endangered species, according to Wildt, you need the expertise of other scientists: specialists in animal husbandry and veterinary medicine; population biologists to keep track of the animals; geneticists in order to identify which animals should be bred with other animals.
Such collaboration among specialists, Wildt said, brings together information to produce a larger picture of the animals he is trying to conserve.
“We just don’t know much about not only the reproductive biology of the species, but the biology of the species,” said Wildt. “We need that information to save species … We don’t want people to forget about the importance of studying the whole, living animal.”
Wildt said he discovered how much is left to learn about animal reproduction during his first job out of school in the late 1970s, a fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine studying the reproductive physiology of cats and dogs.
He said while he was doing his research it occurred to him how different the reproductive systems of cats and dogs were from pigs and cows, two species Wildt studied as a Ph.D. student in physiology and animal husbandry at Michigan State University.
“I started thinking about the diversity in reproductive biology among species,” he said.
Some of his colleagues at the laboratory were interested in working on zoo animals, and Wildt said he asked to go along on their travels to various zoos, where he was able to work with endangered species – including the Siberian tiger.
Wildt wrote later in a 2005 article in the Journal of Andrology that working with the Siberian tiger was a formative experience for him:
As the 250-kg anesthetized beast lay at my feet, swarmed by zoo staff who were collecting body measurements and blood, I peppered these “experts” with questions … My inquiries were met with silence and odd looks. This became an “Aha” moment for me: 1) incredulity that nothing was known, 2) followed by the realization that there was a career to be had here ….
Wildt said that at the time, most scientists working in universities were very focused on their own, specialized disciplines. He said ego often got in the way of collaborative research: “You worked in your own laboratory, you got your own money and you were competitive … even with people who worked across the hall.”
However, Wildt said that attitude has changed a lot over the years. “When you’re working in the wildlife field where we have hundreds and hundreds of animals that are at risk of extinction … and we only have a handful of researchers and a handful fewer research teams, it’s sort of silly to be competitive,” he said.
Collaboration in the field was applied for one of the first times in the early ‘80s, according to Wildt. Scientists learned that cheetahs in Africa didn’t have a lot of genetic variation – a condition that, according to a 1983 paper published in Science by Wildt and others, could be caused by a significant population decline and subsequent inbreeding.
He and other scientists wanted to continue research on cheetahs, Wildt said, by taking all the cheetahs that were housed in zoos in North American and putting them into a single research population for study.
“That was really radical,” Wild said. “There was this concern, I think, about sharing animals.”
But Wildt said that they leveraged newly instituted cooperative breeding programs — commitments by various zoos to share their animals in order to minimize inbreeding — to promote the idea of conducting cooperative research.
“We had to deal with it by peer pressure,” he said.
Over the years, Wildt said, these types of cooperative research programs have increasingly been used in the conservation field, such as with research on giant pandas in China.
“I think right now the examples out there and the progress that’s made by doing this kind of cooperative research, that’s really spurred on lots and lots of cooperation,” said Wildt. “You routinely see institutions working together, partnering up, sharing scientists, sharing animals.”
A recent example of such increased collaboration, Wildt said, was the creation in 2005 of the Conservation Centers for Species Survival, which is a consortium of five large conservation facilities in North America, including the Conservation Biology Institute at the National Zoo. The consortium shares animals and scientists, he said.
With this partnership, Wildt said, the science becomes stronger. More animals in a study means an improved ability to do statistically valid research, but in addition, “you get groups of people together, you come up with better ideas than you can just by working in your own little team,” he said.
One of his greatest priorities these days is the propagation of another breed, said Wildt: the scientists themselves who are doing such collaborative, interdisciplinary work.
“We have to figure out how to get these skills transferred to a younger generation,” he said.
Because, according to Wildt, progress in animal conservation depends in large part on such work.
“The success is coming from these interdisciplinary collaborations and people solving problems by putting their egos a bit to the side and just saying, look, we’re going to share resources and we’re going to share our expertise and we’re going to go out and solve this problem,” he said.
