Archive
SAN DIEGO (April 11, 2024) – San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance has welcomed the 250th California condor to hatch at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The chick’s parents are Xol-Xol (pronounced “hole-hole”)—the first California condor brought into human care under the California Condor Recovery Program in 1982—and Mexwe (pronounced “mex-weh”). More than 40 years since the California condor population dropped to a low of just 22 birds, this milestone is a significant success.
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Leap Day only happens once every four years. Explore which extraordinary wildlife leap, jump, spring, and everything in between.
LA JOLLA, Calif. (Feb. 26, 2024) – Love is in the water for the critically endangered Sunflower Sea Star as a team in California successfully spawned and cross-fertilized gametes from a male and a female, resulting in fertile eggs. This success marks another incredible step forward in an ongoing collaborative effort to save the species from extinction. This advancement took place at Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, where their experts were joined by partners from the Aquarium of the Pacific, California Academy of Sciences, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA) and Sunflower Star Laboratory.
SAN DIEGO (Feb. 14, 2024) – It's a match! In the world of conservation, pairing a perfect couple is more than just a romantic endeavor; it could be the key to saving an endangered species. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA) is playing Cupid for the critically endangered ‘alalā, a unique bird found only in Hawai‘i. In a new, unconventional study recently published in the journal Animal Conservation, SDZWA scientists hoping to hone their matchmaking skills applied personality traits to these crow relatives to find love connections to result in successfully fertilized eggs.
SAN DIEGO (Jan. 1, 2024) – Today San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance participated in the 135th Rose Parade® presented by Honda with a float celebrating the San Diego Zoo’s 107-year history. The float themed “It Began With a Roar” depicted iconic wildlife from the Zoo, including Rex the lion, whose mighty roar sparked a dream more than a century ago and inspired the world-renowned San Diego Zoo.
SAN DIEGO (Dec. 19, 2023) – For more than a decade, the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s entomology team has collaborated with Australia’s Melbourne Zoo to maintain populations of the critically endangered Lord Howe Island stick insect. For the first time in North America, visitors to the San Diego Zoo will have the opportunity to see these rare, nocturnal insects in a specialized habitat at the Zoo’s Wildlife Explorers Basecamp.
SAN DIEGO (Dec. 7, 2023) – In 2017, a team of medical experts—including specialists in the treatment of both human and wildlife patients—gathered to assess an esteemed elder resident of the San Diego Zoo Safari Park: Winston, a critically endangered silverback gorilla. Today, at age 51, he is considered one of the world's oldest male gorillas in managed care.
SAN DIEGO (Nov. 30, 2023) – Scientists at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance have achieved a major milestone in saving wildlife species: With a blue-eyed black lemur’s cells recently added to its Wildlife Biodiversity Bank’s Frozen Zoo®, the nonprofit conservation organization’s unique collection of genetic material now contains 11,00o individual cell lines from more than 1,250 species and subspecies—some critically endangered. No other biobank in the world has a comparable number of living cell lines, with the potential to reverse losses of genetic diversity and contribute to population sustainability for endangered and threatened wildlife species.