Highlights
- Pioneering Legacy: The Frozen Zoo, launched in 1975, holds the world’s largest and most diverse collection of living wildlife genetic material.
- Global Impact: New biodiversity banking efforts span continents, from Kenya to Hawaii, addressing the biodiversity crisis head-on.
- Future-Focused Vision: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance aims to lead the global banking of endangered species by 2075.
Fifty years ago, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo® began preserving living genetic material, long before scientists knew how it might be used. Today this legacy, visionary for its era, is shaping innovative conservation strategies to safeguard wildlife and serves as the foundational blueprint for a crisis that reaches every corner of our planet—the biodiversity crisis.
The Frozen Zoo is the world’s first large-scale, systematic cryogenic (frozen) biological bank dedicated to preserving living cells and reproductive material from wildlife—and remains the largest and most diverse collection of its kind. Building on this vital resource, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance commits to leading the biodiversity banking of all endangered species globally by 2075.
“Species are vanishing at astonishing rates,” said Megan Owen, Ph.D., vice president of wildlife conservation science, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. “By some estimates, Earth loses more than 100 species every day due to mounting environmental and human-driven pressures. While we are advancing technologies to safeguard biodiversity, we recognize that nature itself remains the most powerful biodiversity bank there is—and that biobanking is a unique tool we must develop and use to protect life on Earth, complementing habitat and species protections.”
San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is now leading an ambitious global initiative to make biodiversity banking—the preservation of genetic material in many forms—a tool for species conservation worldwide. As part of this initiative, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, in collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission and the Animal Biobanking for Conservation Specialist Group, established the Center for Species Survival (CSS) Biodiversity Banking, where the organization’s expertise, the largest global network of species expert volunteers, and CSS staff members converge to develop best practices to guide biobanking efforts on all continents.
“We are investing in partnerships to develop biodiversity banking at a scale that matches the challenge of the biodiversity crisis,” said Marlys Houck, curator of the Frozen Zoo. “We have collected irreplaceable genetic biodiversity, which is key to species resilience in the face of environmental change. It’s vital to keep this effort going and support capacity enhancement worldwide, because the species we bank today could be the key to restoring ecosystems tomorrow.”
This global effort focuses not just on mammals, but also on amphibians, reptiles, birds, plant life, marine organisms and invertebrate species that are critical to ecosystem health.
Efforts are emerging around the globe:
- Kenya: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is supporting the construction of a national biobanking repository and increasing biobanking capacity in an area that tackles wildlife challenges on the ground every day.
- Vietnam: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is partnering to enhance expertise through on-site biobanking training in one of the world’s richest biodiversity hotspots.
- Peru: A strategic framework is being developed to biobank species at field sites on both sides of the Andes Mountains.
- Hawaii: Community-led conservation is informing culturally grounded strategies to biobank the Islands’ irreplaceable and rapidly disappearing species.
This work spans marine, forest, and desert ecosystems, aiming to protect keystone species like the sunflower sea star—an organism vital to the coastal kelp forest ecosystem—and help conserve the world’s most endangered animals, such as the northern white rhino and the California condor. It also extends to Hawaiian forest birds and native plants, with San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance at the forefront of cryopreserving kelp, oaks and other foundational species.
“Through our expertise, training and collaboration, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is facilitating the development of a worldwide network that will accelerate and scale the use of biomaterials for wildlife conservation—because protecting wildlife helps fortify the interconnected, delicate web of life we all depend on,” said Owen.
Due to the foresight of Frozen Zoo founder Kurt Benirschke, M.D., living cell lines from over 11,500 individuals representing 1,337 species are banked—almost twice the number of animals currently living at the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Zoo Safari Park combined. Stored in liquid nitrogen at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit, the collection includes living cells, embryos and gametes from mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish.
“For the past half a century, we have been preparing to meet this moment,” said Houck. “And now, we are stepping into a doorway of limitless possibilities, and the work we do today—along with our allies—will shape the next 50 years and beyond.”
The Frozen Zoo is one of six unique San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance biobanking collections that make up its Wildlife Biodiversity Bank. Other collections include the Tissue and DNA Bank, Native Plant Gene Bank, Pathology Archive, Clinical Repository, and Wildlife Artifacts. Together these collections offer a variety of approaches to preserving biodiversity.
Benirschke joined the San Diego Zoo’s research committee in 1970, and in 1975, his forward-thinking efforts founded San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species (CRES), now known as the conservation research program, as well as the Frozen Zoo. After he retired from his director role in 1986, he joined the organization’s board of trustees, serving as president from 1998-2000. Benirschke passed on September 10, 2018, at 94 years old. His legacy lives on and continues to shape global conservation efforts today.
To learn more, explore partnership opportunities, or support this mission, please visit sdzwa.org/frozenzoo50.
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