Photograph by Lisa Hubbard
Across the world, in an animal sanctuary on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, lives a horde of Sumatran rhinos. Ten strong, they represent an estimated one-tenth of what’s left of their species.
Two of those rhinos are brothers—Andalas and Harapan. They were given their names at the Cincinnati Zoo, born into the hands of Terri Roth, director of the Zoo’s Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW). Andalas’s birth in 2001 marked the first Sumatran rhino calf born successfully in captivity in 112 years—a major step for the dwindling species.
Photograph courtesy Cincinnati Zoo
“Thank goodness we figured it out when we did,” says Roth. “In the 1990s, there were all kinds of critics out there who said [a rhino breeding program] was a waste of time. Now pretty much all the conservationists are on the same page, agreeing that we must capture what few rhinos are left, bring them all in, and breed them.”
The situation remains dire, but Andalas and Harapan offer a glimmer of hope, Roth says. Andalas has sired three rhinos, two of which have had calves of their own. Harapan successfully sired his first calf, a male, in 2023.
As Roth thinks about the Cincinnati Zoo turning 150 years-old and the center being 44, she’s proud of what CREW has accomplished. What began with a microscope in a small room of the old Elephant House in 1981 has become a world-renowned center recognized for its role in the conservation not just of rhinos, but many species of plants and animals.
Roth joined as director in 1996, after earning a Ph.D. in animal reproductive physiology from Louisiana State University and finishing a post-doc at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoological Park. By then, assisted reproduction had become common with domestic and agricultural species in the United States and wildlife scientists like Roth had begun dreaming about adapting the science to the endangered species they were desperately trying to save.
“We were idealistic,” she says. “It’s been a much bigger challenge, of course, because each species is just so different. But we have made some good headway.”
Leaders at CREW decided some decades back not to spread the center too thin if they wanted to leave their mark so they established four signature projects: rhinos, imperiled cats, exceptional plants, and polar bears.
Photograph by Djjam Photo
Led by Dr. Lindsey Vansandt, the imperiled cats project has pioneered new methods of freezing semen and artificially inseminating multiple cat species, helping along the propagation of ocelots, jaguars, tigers, sand cats, Pallas’s cats, fishing cats, and more.
Exceptional plants cannot be conserved through conventional seed banking methods, Roth explains. That project has been led by Director of Plant Research Valerie Pence, who has developed protocols for growing threatened species in leaf and root tissue cultures, cryopreserving the samples in case of extinction, but also for use in restoration projects. CREW has its own cryobiobank, Roth says, which today contains samples of roughly 90 animal species and 250 plant species.
Polar bears became a signature project in 2008. Since then, CREW has been striving to help determine why polar bears reproduce so poorly in many zoos and, with increasing climate change, in the wild. Everything on the front end can appear to be working, Roth says. Fertile mates, doing the deed, but no cubs.
Photograph by Djjam
While the Cincinnati Zoo no longer has any polar bears, the program continues to work closely with field researchers in the Arctic with research in Cincinnati focused on finding a way to test for pregnancy, which has proven to be very difficult.
“We have looked at all the hormones that we could, and we can’t distinguish between the truly pregnant and the pseudo-pregnant animals,” Roth says. But it’s important to keep trying, she says, because with the polar bears losing their ice-capped habitat and with it their main food source, seals, the polar bears in captivity are currently the species’ insurance against extinction.
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