Wildlife And Wild Places
Wildlife and Wild Places
Wildlife and wild places are worth fighting for. The WCS community is made up of wildlife champions like you, fighting to preserve a future for iconic animals and irreplaceable habitats. For more than 125 years, WCS has worked to discover and understand the natural world, and to inspire communities to protect endangered species.
WCS Run for the Wild
This year, WCS Run for the Wild is inspired by gharials. These charismatic crocodilians can grow up to 20 feet in length and are excellent swimmers and hunters. They have complex social structures, including elaborate courtship rituals, and males can engage in various vocalizations to communicate with other gharials. They face dire threats from habitat loss and destruction, pollution, and human persecution; the Indian gharial is critically endangered, with fewer than 1,000 remaining in the wild.
WCS has been supporting gharial conservation in the wild through the Gharial Ecology Project for nearly a decade, helping to identify key areas for breeding, nesting, and feeding. Eighty percent of the remaining world population lives in the Chambal River in India—the last stronghold for the species.
You can visit Indian gharials in JungleWorld during your next visit to the Bronx Zoo; our gharials are part of the Species Survival Plan (SSP), developed to conserve critically endangered species. JungleWorld’s gharials serve as ambassadors for their species as part of an ongoing conservation partnership with the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust Center for Herpetology.
SSPs are programs that manage species for gene diversity and demographic (population) stability, which are requisites to have healthy populations in our zoos. There are about 500 SSP programs administered by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, and nearly all are for species that are classified as threatened or endangered. The Bronx Zoo actively participates in almost half of these programs.
The goal of SSPs is to have viable, sustainable populations in our zoos through careful, planned breeding. In order to accomplish this, sophisticated computer analyses determine which animals make the best pairs, and zoos participating in these programs send individual animals to other zoos on a regular basis to assure an adequate exchange of genes across our populations.
Animals around the world are going extinct 10,000 times faster than ever before. Your support will give them a fighting chance.