Noah's New Ark

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Helping animals into the future is a priority for the world's wildlife researchers as an ever growing number of species become imperiled each year. Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the San Diego Zoo's Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, is the driving force behind a 25-year effort to assemble a bank of frozen dna, eggs and sperm from endangered species. Under his direction, the frozen zoo now has living cells from 5,400 animals spanning more than 400 species and subspecies, cultured and frozen in liquid nitrogen.

One missing creature is often on Ryder's mind. "Could you take a cell from a Morro Bay kangaroo rat and bring it back, and would it be the same?" he asks. "There are a lot of questions, but we don't have that option now because nobody saved the cells" while lab work was being conducted on the rodent in the 1970s. "The future will want to know about these species, and the lingua franca of biology is increasingly going to be genomic information. If nobody saves the dna of these samples, it's going to be a very fragmented picture." There is also a present-day, practical side. By providing vital clues to the mingling of subspecies and the types of environment they require, genetic data can help zoologists care for endangered animals in captivity.

Using science to save vanishing species is becoming a global pursuit. Robert Mauget and colleagues at France's National Museum of Natural History, which includes four zoo parks, recently became the first to produce deer embryos in vitro. The technique--incorporating frozen semen and oocytes, or developing egg cells--is expected to be applied later this year to rare and endangered deer species, with more common types acting as surrogate mothers. The French are also talking with colleagues in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan about how they may help rebuild populations of Bactrian (Bukharian) deer in Central Asia. "Basically, we're hoping to give them our recipe," says Mauget.

At Austria's Salzburg Zoo, scientists are developing a recipe they hope will lead to the first production of white rhinos through artificial insemination. Franz Schwarzenberger of Vienna's University of Veterinary Medicine believes success with the tricky technique could help save even more endangered rhino species, such as the northern white. "It may be possible to collect semen in the wild and inseminate animals in captivity," he says. "This kind of assisted reproduction offers us a chance to improve the gene pool of the captive population without taking resources from the wild."

After years of watching one species after another become extinct, researchers are sounding optimistic. "We don't have the right to do nothing," says Mauget, who predicts that interzoo exchanges of sperm, oocytes and embryos will develop rapidly. "Instead of shipping our animals from one zoo to another, we'll be sending sperm to the four corners of the earth." Meanwhile, in a corner of Iowa, another kind of delivery is awaited.