The Denver Zoo quietly has shifted its mission from displaying captive threatened animals to working worldwide for species survival.
The latest project: sending out zookeeper biologists to save the Lake Titicaca giant frog.
This fabled underwater frog (Telmatobius culeus) lives only in that windblown lake, at 12,500 feet elevation, on the Bolivia-Peru border. A fad — grinding up the frogs in blenders for invigorating “frog shakes” — has decimated the species.
A 10-member zoo team will launch a breeding operation next week at a newly established lab in Peru to create an “insurance population” of frogs to forestall extinction. Team leaders say they’ll also develop a strategy, with South American partners, to discourage Peruvian interest in frog shakes. They plan to offer $2,000 rewards for tips that lead to interdiction of smugglers who haul frogs from Lake Titicaca to markets.
For the Denver Zoo, the frog rescue is the latest in a rapidly expanding array of international projects. It reflects a strategic shift from a zoo’s traditional role of displaying captive animals toward making sure animals continue to exist in the wild.
“The Denver Zoo is definitely turning into more of a conservation organization,” said Tom Weaver, supervisor of the zoo’s Tropical Discovery section and leader of the frog-rescue project.
“It used to be zoos collected animals. It was more of an entertainment focus. Now, it’s more education and conservation, especially with regard to amphibians,” Weaver said. “We’re going out there and actually trying to make a difference.”
The zoo’s international projects include missions to help orangutans in Borneo; wild dogs and lions in Botswana; lemurs and freshwater fish in Madagascar; monkeys and elephants in Vietnam; zebras and giraffes in Kenya; and ibex and hedgehogs in Mongolia. A dozen full-time zoo employees are posted in Mongolia, Kenya and Botswana.
Redefining their 114-year-old institution’s purpose over the past two years, zoo leaders replaced an old mission statement, which referred to urban education and science, with one that embraces the global objective: “Secure a better world for animals through human understanding.”
An annual budget topping $26 million, up from $18 million a decade ago, covers the cost of the international projects. Sales taxes from metro Denver’s seven-county area, and grants from foundations and corporations, supply 35 percent of zoo funds. The rest flows from booming visitation. Denver’s zoo recently ranked fourth in visitors in the nation, behind zoos in San Diego, St. Louis and Chicago.
It is building on efforts of New York zoos that pioneered projects aimed at combatting species extinctions worldwide. The estimated 170 million Americans who visit zoos each year, paying admission fees as high as $20, are essential in making that happen. Adult visitors to the Denver Zoo pay $13.
“When you say to someone at the zoo, ‘Would you like to see these animals survive in the wild?’ they say ‘Yeah.’ They may not even know the species are threatened,” Denver Zoo chief executive Craig Piper said.
Zoo visitors who are told of species-survival work abroad tend to be positive, Piper said. ” ‘Tell me more. That’s cool. You mean Denver is having an impact in all those places?’ “
The frog rescue advances a widening effort by U.S. zoos to address the extinction of amphibians. Scientists estimate that 30 percent to 40 percent of the world’s 6,285 known amphibian species will be extinct within 50 years because of polluted waterways, human encroachment on dwindling habitat and a spreading chytid fungus that causes heart attacks.
Following the 1986 extinction of Costa Rica’s golden toad, Weaver and other biologists began tracking amphibians’ demise — 165 species are known to have gone extinct.
In 2002, Denver Zoo biologists began working to save an imperiled golden frog in Panama. (The scientists were later joined in their effort by colleagues from Colorado Springs’ Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.) Golden frogs now are breeding successfully in Denver.
But only a few thousand of the Lake Titicaca giant frogs are thought to have survived frog shakes and pollution in Peru and Bolivia. Denver’s effort ranks among the first to try to reverse the species’ rapid decline over 15 years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has given a $25,000 grant to support the project.
The Denver Zoo helped establish one lab for breeding at a veterinary university in Lima and now will set up another lab at Puna, near the lake. Peruvian laws limit the frog trade for traditional soup and the recent frog-shake craze — but apparently aren’t fully enforced.
On an early trip south, zoo staffer Matt Herbert interviewed locals, trying to understand why the frogs face extinction. A wildlife officer explained that fishermen seek extra money. So do truckers, who are easily tempted into carrying crates of frogs from the lake to urban markets in Cusco and Lima.
“It’s like in China,” Weaver said. “They have the turtle issue where turtles are going extinct because Chinese are eating them in markets. From a cultural perspective, you can’t go in and say what they are doing is wrong.”
So far, the Denver Zoo has spent about $100,000 on the frog effort. The budget now includes money to reward tips leading to busts.
Now zoo biologists will develop and launch a campaign to eradicate frog shakes and maybe, if necessary, look into farming of the frogs, said Meghan Rubinstein, conservation program director for the zoo.
The zoo team also will work with partners to mobilize locals to protect frog habitat around the lake.
“We’ll take a back seat. We’ll let (partners) do the talking,” Rubinstein said.
Bolivian and Peruvian livelihoods “depend on the lake,” especially for fishing, she said.
“Also there’s the tourism industry. And if that lake ecosystem crashes, it’s their loss.”
Bruce Finley: 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com
