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. 22, 2024) – San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA) took an important step forward in having giant pandas return to the San Diego Zoo by signing a cooperative agreement with China Wildlife Conservation Association and filing a permit application with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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. 30, 2024) – San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and San Diego State University (SDSU) are joining forces to usher in a new way of studying snakes. In a collaboration between San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and Rulon Clark, Ph.D., professor of biology at SDSU, biologists are tagging wild rattlesnakes with external transmitters and accelerometers. Previously, telemetry devices on snakes had to be surgically implanted—severely limiting this area of study. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and SDSU are among the first to use acceleration technology to study snakes.

SAN DIEGO (Jan. 19, 2024) – Three baby spider monkeys confiscated at the United States-Mexico border are now safely with the wildlife care specialists at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

Understanding the effects of gold mining is crucial to protecting wildlife in the Peruvian Amazon.

Regenerative medicine is proving to be a vital new therapeutic tool, offering vast new possibilities in veterinary care.

SAN DIEGO (Jan. 9, 2024) – To apply cutting-edge technology to the conservation of koalas, San Diego Wildlife Alliance is partnering with Illumina, a leading genomic sequencing technology company, through the Illumina iConserve program to sequence the whole genomes (an individual’s complete set of DNA) of nearly 100 koalas residing in North America over the past 30 years. Whole genome sequencing is integral to learning more about Koala Retrovirus, KoRV – a virus that can insert into the koala genome and is associated with various health issues in koalas including immunosuppression and cancer.

African penguins and California least terns share marine habitat challenges.