PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #1: Conservation Ecology: Threatened and Endangered Species. Presiding: W. Bond.
Monday, August 6, 2001. 8:00 AM to 12:15 PM. Madison Ballroom C.

Captive breeding: Should we bother?

TENHUMBERG, BRIGITTE¹, TYRE, ANDREW¹, POSSINGHAM, HUGH¹, ¹

ABSTRACT- There is an ongoing debate within the conservation community on the merit of captive breeding as a method to conserve threatened species. Captive breeding is expensive, however provides a level of certainty that may not be possible with in situ conservation. Unfortunately for many species captive breeding is the only viable option to prevent extinction because we do not know the causes of population decline or we are unable to eliminate the problem quickly enough, eg. preventing lead poisoning of condors in the wild, or poaching of Arabian oryx. To use captive breeding most effectively as a tool to manage endangered populations we need to optimise decisions such as when to capture wild animals or release zoo bred individuals in to the wild. To address these management issues, we constructed a first order Markov chain population model of two populations, a captive population and a wild population, and used stochastic dynamic programming to identify optimal timing and size of translocations between the zoo and the wild. This provides a practical tool for captive breeding decision-making and suggests a number of rules of thumb for their management.

KEY WORDS: optimisation, conservation, captive breeding