Travelling across the world to participate in Durrell Wildlife Academy’s 40-year legacy of conservation training, through the Durrell Endangered Species Management (DESMAN) postgraduate certificate, I knew I needed to let go of expectations and prepare for uncertainty. Despite this valiant self-talk, however, I lay awake many nights leading up to my flight to Jersey imagining all the different possibilities I might encounter: Would there be any beverage options other than tea? Would I develop a British accent? Do other countries have genuine maple syrup?
In all these ruminations, I never imagined myself trying to escape from 300 pounds of bumpy shell and flesh that threatened to crush me as a giant tortoise attempted to sit in my lap. Cue a record scratch and freeze frame with my sheepish voiceover: “Yup, that’s me, I bet you’re wondering how I got here.” It all started with my personal skills development task, one of the highlights of DESMAN, in which each student has the opportunity to dedicate undivided time to broaden their skills in a personal area of interest.
This innocent photo was taken at the scene of the crime, just before things started to get out of hand.
No one saw it coming, but I chose to spend my skills development time at the Jersey Zoo herpetology department. Hoping to one day contribute to the study of captive breeding as a conservation tool for endangered reptiles, I sought to immerse myself in the operation of such programs at the zoo. I was very excited to practice using a snake hook for the first time to assist with weighing a gorgeous Madagascar tree boa. Though snake hooking is a gradually developed skill with continuous experience over time, everyone has to start somewhere, and now I have a foundation to build on. This will be my first step towards incorporating venomous snakes into my conservation work, including Ontario’s very own Massasauga Rattlesnake.
In the herpetology department, diet, temperature, and rainfall are regulated to match the annual cycles of those conditions in the wild. Preserving native environmental cycles is vital for captive animals to retain their circannual rhythms (think: biological clocks), which prompt vital life events such as reproduction, migration, and dormancy to occur at optimal times each year. This is an important consideration to maximize animal health and welfare in any captive environment, particularly for animals that are removed from the wild and housed at latitudes with different conditions than they are used to.
This calendar reminds keepers of the seasonal changes of the animal enclosure conditions. The black ‘X’s represent shoulder seasons, during which diet, temperature and humidity are gradually adjusted into the upcoming wet/dry season.
From a conservation standpoint, this is a vital consideration for populations reared in captivity for multiple generations, whether as safety net populations (in case of catastrophic decline in wild population) or in rescue missions (temporarily removing animals from the wild while an environmental disaster is cleaned up). Captive environments must be kept as similar to native environments as possible to ensure that the optimal genetic makeup for success in the wild is preserved, and to minimize artificial selection for individuals better adapted to captivity.
This may sound simple, however, with smaller populations being more vulnerable to genetic loss – but also more urgent to breed; in conjunction with native habitat conditions being more conducive to genetic sustainability – but also more time consuming to implement, conservation breeding is always an extremely complicated undertaking. The urgency we conservationists feel to reverse a population decline as quickly as possible, ‘before it’s too late’ (and this is not hyperbole, for there does come a point when it is too late), inherently contradicts the patient, evolutionary perspective required for the long-term success of these programs. In the end, a balance must be achieved.
The Jersey Zoo demonstrates this balance in its temporary housing of a small population of endemic, endangered lizards from Mauritius. A total of 66 Bojer’s skinks, Bouton’s skinks, and lesser night geckos were rescued from a handful of offshore islets of Mauritius that were impacted by a devastating oil spill in 2020. While their habitats are being restored, the herpetology department is tasked with breeding 180 individuals of each species, with the eventual goal of being able to release them back into their native homes.
To ensure these populations remain genetically diverse and well-adapted to the wild, the department uses a variety of specialized husbandry techniques such as hands-off rearing, using genetic records of each individual to ensure suitable breeding pairs are housed together, and the regulation of circannual weather patterns as mentioned above. This includes the on-site breeding of live insects to mimic wild prey availability in Mauritius’ wet season, during which insect populations increase alongside vegetation growth.
