Parks or arks: where to conserve threatened mammals?

Abstract

Growing deterministic and stochastic threats to many wild populations of large vertebrates have focused attention on the conservation significance of captive breeding and subsequent reintroduction. However, work on both gorillas and black rhinos questions this shift in emphasis. In these species, field-based conservation can be effective if properly supported and, although this is not cheap, per capita costs may still be considerably lower than for ex situ propagation in captivity. Here we attempt to broaden the scope of this debate by contrasting the breeding success and costs of in situ and captive programmes for a range of threatened mammals. Data are scarce, but we find that across nine large-bodied genera, in situ conservation achieves comparable rates of population growth to those seen in established captive breeding programmes. Moreover, comparing budgets of well-protected reserves with zoos' own estimates of maintenance costs and the costs of zoo adoption schemes, we find that per capita costs for effective in situ conservation are consistently lower than those of maintenance in captivity. Captive breeding may be more cost-effective for smaller-bodied taxa, and will often remain desirable for large mammals restricted to one or two vulnerable wild populations. However, our results, coupled with the fact that effective in situ conservation protects intact ecosystems rather than single species, lead us to suggest that zoos might maximize their contribution to large mammal conservation by investing where possible in well-managed field-based initiatives, rather than establishing additional ex situ breeding programmes.