Join us on May 19th and 20th for wildlife Heroes weekend. On May 20th we welcome Jeff Flocken, co-author of Wildlife Heroes: 40 Leading Conservationists and the Animals they are Committed to Saving for a book-signing and presentations by zoo staff on the focus species of the book. Wildlife Heroes will be available for sale at the zoo on May 20th, quantities are limited! Books are also available for pre-order on the Houston Zoo website at: http://www.houstonzoo.org/wildlife-heroes/for a dicounted price until May 17th.
To give you an idea of the projects covered in the book, we thought we would highlight a few of the projects the Houston Zoo supports throughout the week:
Dr. Patricia Medici, Lowland Tapir Conservation Initiative
The Houston Zoo has been a fan of Pati Medici’s going back nearly a dozen years. Chair of the IUCN (World Conservation Union) Tapir Specialist Group, Dr. Medici assists in directing conservation activities for all four species of Tapir – 3 from Latin America and 1 from Malaysia.
Tapirs are what we would call “landscape architects”. They not only create trails through the thick underbrush of the forest for other animals, but they also manage the forest because of the plants they eat and the seeds they disperse.
The Lowland Tapir Conservation Initiative aims to establish a long-term Tapir Research and Conservation Programs in all key Brazilian biomes. Specifically, basic ecology, population demography, habitat use and animal movement, genetic profile, and health status will be evaluated in each biome. The main goals of this project are to use the data collected to assess the conservation status and viability of the lowland tapir populations in the Brazilian biomes, and to design specific set of recommendations for the conservation of the species in each one of them.
