Putting a Species on the Map | Explorers Fest

[Applause] Thank you. Last time I was here in DC, I had the chance to be on stage. You know what I did? I came flying just like that. Many people have been asking me, do you still fly? The answer is yes, I fly every day, and I enjoy it. And the hope today is many of you join me in this adventure.

Anyway, let me tell you about my long journey to flying. When I was a young boy, my friends and I ran around and explored everything around us. We climbed trees, we went deep into the marshland, and we jumped. We had a lot of fun! We'd go through the thorns, through the shrubs, just to see birds. I could tell you for hours about our adventures with birds, but today I want to tell you about one special bird, the grey crowned crane.

I remember watching them when I went to collect water for my family down at the bottom of the hill at the valley. This was a highlight of my childhood. We would watch them dancing, hear them calling. I always wanted to fly like them. You can't imagine how many times I made pretend feathers so that I could fly like them. I tried to fly in a fair, down, and a fair, and a fair down. I had to go home with injuries, and my parents would ask me, "Olivier, what happened to you?" But I wouldn't tell because I wanted to try again and again and again, and because I believed anything is possible.

As I was growing up, I slowly lost my hope to fly. Sad, I thought, oh, I would never be able to fly like a crane. Residing in my country, Rwanda, it's so beautiful that anyone can wish to be a bird to enjoy this beautiful view. But unfortunately, my country is one of the highly populated in Africa. Densities have reached over 500 people per square kilometers, and this does not make it easy for conservation.

My life, this is the photo of the Volcanoes National Park, and it clearly shows you the line of how people have been pushing for agricultural land. In 1994, when genocide was happening in my country, it ruined the country. I was nine years old. After the genocide, I wanted to contribute to rebuilding my country. My very first job was to be a conservation doctor—one dream job. For the first time, I felt like I was contributing to rebuilding my country by saving a critically endangered species in my country. But guess what? I wasn't flying.

My head was not in the right place. I started exploring what was happening with the grey crowned cranes, and this is what I found. With less than 500 friends in my country, if nothing was done, we could lose all of them. So what's happening? Grey crowned cranes have been losing most of their habitats. But in addition, this is happening: there is a huge demand for pet trade. Many people want to have them in their gardens, in hotels, as pets. Local communities, driven by poverty and lack of awareness, they are hunting, poaching, and selling to those who want to have them.

So cranes, when they end up in captivity, people cut feathers to stop them from flying. They never make good pets, and we lose a huge number of cranes to malnutrition. People don't know how to care for them, and stress—and most, most important—these cranes, they can't breathe in captivity. So if we’ve lost a huge number of cranes. When I became aware of this, I told myself I'm going to have to do something about it. That's when I founded an organization to help these cranes with our ultimate goal to stop the illegal trade and remove all the captive cranes.

We have been implementing a number of strategies. I can't say it all; there's so much activity. But today I want to tell you about one strategy: it's illegal to keep cranes in any captivity in my country. But when I saw that people really loved them and they want to have them, or they are not aware of the consequences, I decided just to go on with awareness.

So we launched a media campaign. We went on radios, television, and we taught the people, "Did you know the cranes that we love could disappear? Did you know that our grandkids, our great-grandkids might not be able to see the cranes?" And I told them, "If we really, really love cranes and you want to give them a second chance, let's do something about it!" I opened my phone, my private phone number, to the whole country. I said, "Please call me if you want to register to tell me you have a crane."

So many people have been calling me voluntarily. We have the gist at about 288 cranes, and when you register, these people accept that we can take those cranes. So we've been taking them, confiscating them—not confiscating them, but people have accepted. So when we take them, we put them under quarantine, have checks, and the purpose of this is to identify cranes that can have a second chance to go back to the wild.

And when the quarantine is finished, this is what happens today: we'll be releasing 100 cranes into the wild. [Music] [Music] Running, some of them flying. The huge leap had one friend. They like to flock up to find food together, sleep together, and every time I see them reminds me how, like as humans, we need to work in a team. We can't succeed with everything we're doing without working together.

Ladies and gentlemen, for a long time I felt like I would never be able to fly. But recently I found something: every time I release the captive cranes, I see them flying across my eyes, and I fly with them. I can't fly, but I want to take something good that has been happening. We have reintroduced about 156 cranes into the wild, and these constitute 30% of the whole population of cranes in my country. This is not only the only thing that is happening; the cranes, they are coupling, and they’re having chicks, and this gives me hope for the grey crowned cranes in my country.

Sadly, during the whole process, we've come across a huge number of cranes that are disabled. Many people have accidentally or purposefully broken the wings, so these cranes will never be able to fly. We have over 50 cranes that are in these conditions, but the good news: the government has given us use of 21 hectares in the capital city, and we want to transform this place into a crane area—almost a village. It's like a great crane village. We want to build a huge environmental education center. We want to educate the last community in Rwanda, and this means we can achieve our goal of not having any cranes in captivity and we can end the trade.

So if you ever want to fly, if you have ever wanted to fly, please join me. Together we can end the trade in grey crowned cranes. Together we can give hope to the grey crowned cranes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!

Olivier: What an incredible story of hope! Next, please welcome the 2019 National Geographic Buffett Award for Conservation Leadership recipient, Patricia Medici.

Patricia Medici: Hello everyone! This is a tapir. This is a lowland tapir. This is the animal I’m passionate about. This is the most incredible animal on the face of the earth. There's them, not open for discussion. This is the largest land mammal in South America. They can weigh up to 250 kilos. They're massive. They're gorgeous. They live throughout South America in 11 different countries, 21 different ecoregions, and many different habitat types: forests, grasslands, floodplains. They're very plastic animals; they can be found in all kinds of habitats. They're closely associated with water; they're excellent swimmers. They're fantastic swimmers—they swim super fast! They're nocturnal, they're solitary, and they're very elusive animals. Very difficult to see a tapir in the wild, very, very difficult. They're herbivores; 100% fifty percent of their diet consists of fruit, and when they eat fruit, they swallow the seeds and disperse those seeds throughout the landscape through their feces.

They have this major, major, extremely important role in shaping and maintaining biodiversity, and for that reason, they're known as the gardeners of the forest. So if tapirs go extinct, forests and habitats will be very, very different from what they are right now. This is a baby tapir—the watermelon— the cutest animal offspring in the animal kingdom. There is no competition, again, not open for discussion. What makes tapirs so charismatic is pretty much the baby tapir. So we use these pictures a lot.

This is the problem: not many people actually know what a tapir is. Many people think this is a tapir. This is not a tapir; this is a giant anteater. Tapirs do not eat ants; they do not eat termites—never ever! I told you they eat fruit. The people who do know what a tapir is, particularly in Brazil, they actually associate tapirs with a lack of intelligence, and that's a whole different problem. Because in Brazil, if you want to call somebody, let's say, stupid, you will call that person a tapir. It's more or less like here in the US, like calling somebody a jackass. So that's it; that's a huge public relations problem that we are trying to solve, and it's only in Brazil. We don't really know where it comes from; we're trying to figure that out.

Since 1996, we have been working throughout the country and all the different biomes where tapirs are found in Brazil. We have established research and conservation programs in the Atlantic Forest, in the Pantanal, and in the Sahado. Right now, at this very moment, we are establishing our fourth and final program in the Brazilian Amazon. We work mostly outside of protected areas, on private land, where we're most needed. In each one of the regions, in each of the biomes, we identify and make assessments of all the different threats affecting tapirs in that particular region, which usually includes habitat destruction.

Poaching is a very serious problem for tapirs throughout Brazil and South America—pesticide contamination and poaching. Once we have that information, once we finish those assessments, we have all the data we need to design and implement local strategies for their conservation in all these different regions throughout the country. Over the past 20-23 years, we have captured, we have radio-collared, and we have monitored hundreds of tapirs throughout the country. So we have tons and tons of information coming in every day, and those pieces of information are extremely important to us to help us design those conservation strategies that I mentioned before—make them effective, make them realistic for each one of the different regions we're dealing with.

But it's not all about the science. At some point in our history, we realized that we were doing amazing science; we were collecting fantastic data. We were designing all these amazing conservation strategies. We were publishing; we were presenting at conferences, but we were, more or less, preaching to the converted. We were not talking to the public. So we decided that communication had to be a big component of the work we do in Brazil, and Brazil is huge—we have lots of people in my country.

So a good part of our energy is spent communicating, talking to the general public, using all the different tools that are available out there: social media, networks, art, photography, film, TV. Brazilians love television! The press—we use everything we can to talk to the public as often as possible to spread the word about the tapir conservation cause as widely as possible in Brazil mostly, but also internationally. And Brazil is going through several important changes right now. I'm sure you're all aware of that. We have a new so-called president in the country, and all our conservation environmental agencies, all our legislation, all our environmental policy—everything is being dismantled, completely dismantled by the minute as we speak.

All of us conservationists in Brazil and around the world, we have to stand up for this fight. We have to speak up. We have to make sure we’ll be heard throughout this process. We know it's gonna be hard and painful, but we have to do that. And speaking for myself, all I can say is that I will keep doing whatever I can. I'll do whatever it takes to make sure that these animals and all the habitats where they are still found will not go extinct. Thank you so much!

[Applause] Thank you! Thank you, Patricia. I'd love to go see a tapir out there in the wild, wouldn't you? Yeah! So if you're joining us tomorrow night for the awards program dinner, you'll have a chance to hear even more about Patricia's incredible work. Our last speaker for this session is a very familiar face for many of you. We call him the Batman around here because he really is the real Batman, and he's always available to advise you on your best choice of tequila. Join me in welcoming biologist and National Geographic Explorer-at-large, Rodrigo Medellin.

Rodrigo Medellin: No, I don't fly either; I do not fly. So when National Geographic asked me to share some stories and some lessons about how to put a species on the map, I immediately started thinking, "Well, what map? What is the map?" So this is a result of the reflections that I've been going through since they asked me, and it's a joy that I hope that I'll be able to convey some of these lessons to you all.

Oops, I have to go back. This situation of putting a species on the map is not an easy thing to do because you have to start from where do you begin by finding a species? I’m gonna talk about two cases, two species—two different species. When you choose a species, you don’t choose the species because it’s very beautiful or because it’s very charismatic. In fact, most of the time, the species chooses you, and they choose you by instigating passion and by posing incredible questions and fascinating challenges that you really want to get engaged in and that you feel you may have a little bit of a solution for the problems that are affecting those species.

So it’s really the opposite: species choose you. When you’re talking about bats, can you believe that there are people who are horrified about that? How can that possibly be? But unfortunately, it is true. However, there are many ways in which you can turn the tide around and make people adore bats, and I’m talking about when you’re talking to kindergartners or senators or governors or whatever local communities—anybody. You start talking about the ecosystem services that bats provide to you and to them, and then they start figuring out, “Oh yeah, but they’re not that horrifying after all!”

This is exactly the message that we need to convey. When you work on bats, you have to do a lot of research; you have to work with many maps. What are the maps that you’re working on? This is just one collection of maps, but there are so many other maps. In this case, it’s the federal government and the industry and the multilateral and environmental agencies, but you also have to work with the local communities, with the children in the schools, and so on and so forth. And each of those is a different map, and you have to work on those and many other maps.

So you have to put your species on all of those maps. Shifting gears, let’s go to the jaguar. Jaguars have a very powerful and positive image already to begin with, right? People like jaguars! However, jaguars get in trouble very often; they attack cattle, and that is a problem that we created ourselves because we invaded the land of the jaguar and we put these animals in front of them, and we removed their original prey, and we’re asking them not to touch our animals. What? I’m sorry, that is a problem that we created.

To solve these problems, you have to do a lot of research involving finding out what are the movements of the animals, what is their spatial ecology, and the diet of the animals. Here you can see a member of my team, Tony La Torre, who is probably here in the audience—I hope!—somewhere. That’s right, he’s not here. Thank you very much, but he is one of the top jaguar experts in the world, and with him we’ve done a lot of this work.

Once you have your science in place, please, please publish! If you publish, you are going to have the respect of your peers, and you’re going to have the credibility of science. But publishing is not all. To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, publishing is not the end. Polishing is not even the beginning of the end; polishing is the end of the beginning. We need to sit down with every group of stakeholders and work with them, get each and every one of your lessons digested and put it in their hands so that they can get your science and your findings and they can put them in their everyday practices or into public policy or both.

But if you don’t have the science there and if you don’t have the publishing there, then you don’t have the credibility; you have to have both. Some of the results that we have achieved over the years in the case of the bats is number one that bats are now stable. All of the colonies that we’ve been following for the past 30 years are either stable or growing, and in many places, we have delisted a species of bat, and we’re in the process of working towards the listing of several other species of bats. Thank you! Thank you very much! Thanks a lot!

We have achieved the routing of the outreach and education. Today, we’re not the only ones; by far we’re not the only ones that are talking about bats in a positive light. There are many other people that are doing this, and this is exactly the commitment that we want to instigate in the Mexican public and everywhere else. There’s also a new generation of conservation scientists already working in their own countries—in Mexico, in Latin America, in Asia, in Africa, and many other places where we’ve been working.

This is really putting a species on the map. In the case of the jaguars, we have a very strong program on jaguar compensation in which responsible ranchers get their money whenever a jaguar attacks a head of cattle if they have respected the original prey of the jaguar, if they did not hunt any jaguars either, and if they’re not deforesting. If they do that, I am very happy to report that this year we celebrated case number 400 in which the federal government of Mexico paid compensation because of these responsible ranchers that are working with us for the conservation of the jaguar.

Ten years ago, we achieved the fact that Mexico became the first country in the world to have an estimate of how many jaguars we have, and because of us doing a second national jaguar survey last year, we can now report that the jaguar population grew by 20 percent last year to 4,800 jaguars in all of Mexico. So that is a—thank you! Thank you very much! Again, it’s putting the species on the map in a much bigger way.

You need to get out of your comfort zone. Being there as an academic, I never dreamed that I would be working in the multilateral environmental agreements, so it took me a big effort to get out there and start working inside. You have to get out of your comfort zone. We have to create enabling communities of change. We need to do that. Do not take yourself too seriously. Don’t take yourself too seriously; come down from the ivory tower. You are just one more human being and you can interact with everyone else. Having a PhD is absolutely nothing—nothing! You have to come down from the ivory tower, work with other sectors, reach out! If you’re an academic, work with the governments; if you’re a local practitioner, work with academics, etc., etc. And never, ever give up. Thank you very much!

[Applause] Wow, that was amazing! Thank you, Rodrigo. Now that we've gotten to know a few cool species, I'm very excited to introduce you to one very cool animal that all of you will get to experience right here. But before that, let’s watch this short video.

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Our next group of speakers are here to share much more information about the charismatic Sumatran rhino. To introduce them, our moderator is the Senior Director of Wildlife at National Geographic Society, where she oversees the grants portfolio for wildlife research and conservation projects. Please welcome Kathryn Workman.

Kathryn Workman: The Sumatran rhino holds several rhino superlatives. It’s the smallest, the hairiest, the most vocal, the closest living relative of the extinct woolly rhinoceros, and it’s the most threatened of the five living rhino species. Its home is in the Sundaland hotspot—one of Earth’s most biologically rich yet threatened terrestrial areas. Historically, it was found across Malaysia and Indonesia and as far north on the mainland as China and Bangladesh. Today, however, wild Sumatran rhinos are restricted to the forests of Indonesia, mostly on the island of Sumatra, as well as on Kalimantan, the Indonesian side of the island of Borneo.

Now, it’s a tough species to survey because they’re mostly solitary animals, but population estimates, as you just saw, are less than 80 individuals, and the population is decreasing. In fact, experts now consider isolation to be the single biggest threat to the species. Animals aren’t finding each other to mate, and so they’re not making enough rhino babies—something that our panelists will elaborate on in just a minute.

So, I can be in a panel on the Sumatran rhino. Well, this species represents an incredible amount of evolutionary history, being the only living member of the most primitive group of rhinos that emerged 15 to 20 million years ago. Should this small, hairy, singing species blink out, it would be the first extinction of a full mammalian genus since the Tasmanian tiger disappeared in 1936. But there's a more optimistic reason for us to have our conversation today, and that is that in partnership with the Indonesian government, the conservation community has united in an unprecedented effort to bring the species back from the brink. Should the effort succeed, this heralds a new model of conservation moving forward.

So to talk about that effort and all things Sumatran rhino, we have a great panel for you. I do want to say very sadly that the National Geographic fellow on this project, whose name is Rudy Putra, and who himself hails from the island of Sumatra, was unfortunately unable to join us at the very last minute, so Rudy will not be on the panel today. But we have four terrific folks who I'm going to introduce now.

So, Colby Bishop is the manager of wildlife programs for the National Geographic Society. Korin Cegas Kalshki is a conservationist and National Geographic Labs Fellow. Kira Milam is the director of strategic partnerships for the IUCN Species Survival Commission, and CeCe Vurt is the deputy director of the International Rhino Foundation. Please welcome our panelists!

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Welcome, guys! CeCe, we’re gonna start with you on the end there because you and your organization, the International Rhino Foundation (IRF), for this conversation, have been working on so much. I know you've been in conservation for decades. So introduce everyone here in the audience and online to the species.

CeCe Vurt: Sure! So, the Sumatran rhino is a species on the brink of extinction. Some even consider it the most endangered land mammal on Earth. There are fewer than 80 individuals, as you said, and they are distributed across mostly in Sumatra across ten small sub-populations. Some of these sub-populations are so tiny they’re as small as two or three individual animals. The Sumatran rhino is so isolated, and in addition to that, with a small number, the third problem is that the females have a reproductive pathology. So the longer the females go without breeding, the more likely they are to grow tumors or cysts in the reproductive tract.

So the problem is the longer they are isolated, the less likely they are to successfully breed if they do have the opportunity to come together and have a reproductive act. Looking at this species back in 2015, a group of scientists came together and they did what’s called a population viability analysis, and they looked at all these factors like this small population and genetic and demographic changes. They realized that any population that’s smaller than 15 animals will essentially just sort of die off in a quiet way, without any help, into existence. And that is all based on zero poaching and zero human mitigated threats.

So these tiny populations are highly at risk of just disappearing into nowhere.

Kira Milam: If they aren’t brought together, if they aren’t breeding regularly in a larger population, then we’re going to lose this whole species, and we’re actually going to lose the whole genus, because it’s not just a species; it’s the entire genus.

Kathryn Workman: So Kira, given what CeCe just laid out for us, what is the Sumatran rhino rescue effort? How was this conceived, who’s involved, and what is this effort trying to achieve?

Kira Milam: Sure! As CeCe said, there have been decades of science and efforts to save Sumatran rhinos, but they just really weren’t, as a species, stepping back from that extinction cliff, despite many fantastic efforts.

So what we needed was one strategy, a one-plan approach that brought the governments and the NGOs and the global scientific community together to work as one team to save the Sumatran rhino.

In doing that, the world community of scientists worked with the Indonesian government officials to really come to an agreement that the only strategy at this point in time to save Sumatran rhinos was to find those isolated populations and relocate them into specifically built and designed breeding facilities to really grow the population, with the intention of once the population has grown, getting them back out there into the wild.

Last year, we came together in a project—a groundbreaking collaboration led by the Indonesian government. Unfortunately, there's no one here from the Indonesian government partnership representing today, but we would like to express our heartfelt thanks for the leadership in this initiative. We brought together five founding organizations: National Geographic, the IUCN Species Survival Commission, International Rhino Foundation, and also in the room today, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Global Wildlife Conservation.

So these five conservation organizations came together with the Indonesian government to create an alliance that would work together with conservation organizations on the ground—implementing partners with technical experts around the world, bringing together veterinary expertise, technology expertise, husbandry, communication, and fundraising to really work on one plan. From that, we've created the Alliance—each of those partners have put in a million dollars each towards a much larger fundraising goal, with a commitment to work together to reach that goal and work with all of those partners to make sure that this effort is a success.

So what is that timeline of that?

Kira Milam: We’ve got an ambitious three-year fundraising timeline, but obviously, this project is much longer than that. The implementation plan at the moment spans five years, and we’re one year in, so another four years. But obviously, we’re working very closely with the Indonesian government on a rescue and breeding effort, so this fits within a wider Indonesian government initiative of a national breeding strategy for Sumatran rhinos.

The intention is to bring those rhinos in, establish these facilities, so there are three objectives for the project. One is to build two new centers: one in Indonesian Borneo and one in northern Sumatra, and to expand the existing facility in Wei Kamus National Park in southern Sumatra.

Then to find these rhinos, relocate them into these centers, and then establish a breeding program, working through the challenges that CeCe just mentioned with their reproductive pathology, and then work with the Indonesian government, the communities, and implementing partners to ensure that it can be carried into the long term for the survival of the species.

Kathryn Workman: Excellent! Great! Thanks! So Colby, as your advantage from your vantage, I guess as director of wildlife programs, what role did you see for National Geographic here? What contributing value did Geographic want to add to this alliance?

Colby Bishop: Yeah, definitely! So as Kira and CeCe set up for us, over decades of research and science have gone into figuring out how the Sumatran rhino works. We know how to take care of it in a sanctuary; we know how Sumatran rhinos can mate and how to successfully breed them in a sanctuary.

So National Geographic’s unique role in this effort is to put the Sumatran rhino on the map! We just had a fabulous panel talking about bringing these lesser-known species, species that maybe people haven't heard about, living in faraway places. There are only 80 left. Our job is to take pictures like this: this is Joel Sartore's photo arc image of a Sumatran rhino so people can look into the eyes of this species that maybe they've never seen before, see the hair on its back, and get to know it.

We just had our storytelling team down at one of the sanctuaries in Wei Kamus in Indonesia, and they were there to film with the seven Sumatran rhinos that live there, but also to get to know and tell the stories of the keepers that work so closely with the Sumatran rhinos and the veterinarians that live on-site with the rhinos to make sure that they're healthy, and then of the surrounding communities as well that have community gardens to help feed the rhinos.

So our job really is to tell the 20 million years of evolutionary history that’s at stake and gain public support and get everyone involved in this important effort.

Korin Cegas Kalshki: Wilson, you have an interesting resume. You have the 3D scan of the tomb of Christ; you’ve digitized the mummified remains of a dinosaur in Canada. So what exactly is the contribution of your role of technology, your type of technology, to this Sumatran rhino rescue effort?

Wilson Corry: Good question! So, I’ve been developing technologies for exploration and scientific study with National Geographic for about 10 years, and while doing this, I realized there’s another critical use of these technologies, and that’s to show people some of these places we work in a different light, in a way, using these technologies that they couldn’t otherwise experience.

My team and I have built some pretty wild things. We’ve built color night-vision cameras to look up in the trees of jungles to see nesting chimpanzee families and see how they interact at night. We’ve built deepwater systems that have been able to go miles back in caves and take underwater images—some of the highest resolution underwater images in the world of these incredible places—and even equipment to work in really harsh environments like taking time-lapses from everywhere, from Mount Everest to Antarctica for the extreme ice program.

Following along with this mission, a couple years ago, we started doing 3D scanning—mostly of cultural and big natural places that are in danger in some fashion—so that we could preserve, protect, and share them! We scanned, as you mentioned, the tomb of Christ, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was part of a big museum exhibit here at National Geographic. We’ve scanned the entire Nabataean city of Petra in Jordan in submillimeter resolution, all of Chichén Itzá, in the interior of all the buildings—tombs that hadn’t been accessed for a hundred years with my friend Guerra Miodian, and natural places like the Okavango River Delta, about a thousand square kilometers of that, and a thousand square kilometers of Garamba in the National Park in DRC with my friend Naftali Hoenig.

They are using that at African Parks for anti-poaching efforts. So with all these crazy big places that we’ve scanned, you might think that when National Geographic contacted me and said, “Hey, do you think you could 3D scan a living Sumatran rhino?” that might have sounded easy, but it didn’t! I almost said no, actually.

So the challenge there is; when we’re scanning these cultural sites like big rock temples, they’re basically the same for years and years at a time! Our normal method of scanning is to bring six or eight people to a site and work at it for a month to do this big area 3D scan at millimeter resolution. The problem with living animals, of course, is that they move!

So we basically have to do the same scan that we do in these big places, but do it in a millisecond. So you know, that scared me quite a bit! I knew that if we managed to pull this off, that we’d have something incredible—we’d have not just—we’d have an experience of the rhino that if we digitized the rhino, made a digital copy and did video reference for all the motion analysis, we’d have something we could share with the world and give everybody an up-close look at the rhino and give them a way to be inspired and to share their—I know that they’ll probably never be able to see in the wild.

We thought this could be so much more than a flat image; we thought maybe we could even take the rhino and we could put it in the room with you. You could hear its footsteps, you can hear its vocalization, and get the experience of it walking next to you.

So meet Harapan, the Sumatran rhino. How the heck did you make that happen?

Wilson Corry: Well, so we traveled on-site. My wife and I traveled to Sumatra, where we worked with the Sumatran rhino rescue there to actually 3D scan the creatures. So instead of doing a single hairpin, yep, instead of using a single camera on lots of people, we used lots of cameras!

So we could set them all up outside of the enclosure that he voluntarily goes in every day, lured by watermelon to receive veterinary care. So these bars were nice and wide apart, so we could actually put our camera system outside of them, looking through the bars of the enclosure so the rhino wouldn’t destroy our cameras, which was a big concern.

It rained hard every day, so we had this type over the top that was already part of the enclosure that we could keep the cameras dry. But we set up this array of 18 cameras in this case—all high-resolution, still cameras—and our idea was we could fire them all at the exact same time and capture a 3D scan in the same fashion that we would one at a time for a big archaeology site.

So we set up this big array of cameras pointed at the rhino and got them all focused at where we would think the rhino would stand, and this is part of the hard part, right? Getting a large rhino over to stand exactly where we wanted to is not necessarily easy, but fortunately, he’s very food-motivated and he loves watermelon, so exactly, we were able to get that done.

And so, as we were doing focus tests, he’s standing exactly where we want the rhino to stand, and he’s all cued up to a group of boxes that synchronized the cameras within a millisecond from each other so that we could fire the button at once and capture the rhino from every angle.

Just like your two eyes give you stereo vision by the inter-ocular distance of your eyes, we basically had 18 cameras, so we had 18 factorial, which is a really big number of eyeballs—eye pairs of eyes looking at the rhino, developing a 3D scan of him! And because we were doing it from one side, we’d take an image of him from one side and then have the watermelon moved to the other side so we’d have him turn around. Piece by piece, we built up this entire scan of the rhino!

You can see the 3D model that we came out with here, and then, as you already saw, we can animate the rhino, bring him back to life, and we built up a virtual Sumatran jungle to play some back end so that people could experience him in his environment!

When you’re done here, if you go across to the cafeteria, we have a large 3D dome with glasses that you can experience the rhino in the Sumatran jungle. So it was a pleasure and an honor to work with this amazing animal, and I hope that by helping you to share them with the world, we can make more people care about them and continue to protect this amazing animal.

It’s amazing!

And it was fabulous to see the front row try to pet Harapan as he passed by! It’s incredible, Cory, really! That is—but CeCe, this is not the first time that Harapan has been in the states. First time in our auditorium here, certainly! But Harapan has a history in the U.S. going back to the 1980s, right?

CeCe Vurt: Well, yeah! He was originally born here! But the whole history of captive Sumatran rhinos goes back to the 80s. Back in the '80s, scientists were realizing that this population was starting to plummet—the numbers were going down. At that time, the estimated population was anywhere from 400 to 800 individuals.

In 1984, a group of scientists came together in Singapore and decided that they would capture Sumatran rhinos and bring them into zoos around the world to create an insurance population, so to speak, so that if, God forbid, the wild population did disappear, we would have a backup population.

So over a period of approximately 10 years, approximately 40 animals were captured, including Harapan's parents, and they were dispersed across zoos all around the world. This was an incredible opportunity because Sumatran rhinos hadn't been in the care of zoos before, so it was an amazing opportunity to learn about both their husbandry and care as well as their nutrition.

You know, you think about what a white rhino eats; he’s just a big lawnmower in South Africa! And then you think about the landscape that a Sumatran rhino lives in—there are no wide-open fields of grass! They’re eating twigs! They love their watermelon; they are very food-motivated, but they eat hundreds of different species of plants! So this was an incredible opportunity to learn about this species.

Unfortunately, we were learning about a lot of the species, but babies were not being born. By 1995, there were only three Sumatran rhinos left in the U.S. There was one over in L.A., and then there were two in Cincinnati Zoo. The decision was made to bring them all together so that we could try and focus our last efforts on making rhino babies. At that time, Dr. Teri Roth was hired at Cincinnati, and she had one main goal, which was to make babies—rhino babies, sorry.

And so they did assessments of the animals, and it turns out that one of the females wasn’t reproductively viable. So that means they had one male, Apu, and one female, Emmy. Teri put all of her efforts into trying to get a baby out of these two, and for years she was doing ultrasounds and trying to figure out what Emmy’s cycle was so that they could make this baby, and she just could—she was not ovulating.

And so what they ended up doing was putting—putting—like, putting them together and seeing what happens. And I don’t know if any of you have seen rhinos mate; it is not the most gentle act—I’ll just say that! Females often get quite injured in the process, but they really had no other choice! So they put the animals together, and miraculously they got along pretty well and soon thereafter, Emmy actually ovulated!

That’s when Teri sort of cracked this whole nut on Sumatran rhino breeding, and it’s the fact that they are induced ovulators. So, most mammals, you know, humans for example, will cycle every 28 days. But Sumatran rhinos only cycle when there is an interaction between the males and females.

This is a huge discovery! Once they figured that out, they thought, “Alright, we’re going to start making rhino babies!” And so meanwhile, around the same time, the International Rhino Foundation and our on-the-ground partner in Indonesia, the Rhino Foundation of Indonesia, also known as Yabi, we established the first Sumatran rhino sanctuary in Wei Kamus National Park, and that’s where Harapan currently lives.

And so we had three animals there, but they weren’t mating. I mean, we got sitting but we got to make some babies! So now that Teri had finally sort of cracked this nut on the induced ovulation, they actually got Emmy pregnant, but then she had a miscarriage. So then they got her pregnant again, and then another miscarriage, and she had five miscarriages.

We were really losing hope! I mean, these were the last two animals we had to work with in captivity! So eventually, Teri started on hormone therapy, and it worked! The pregnancy held! So they just had to wait. The problem is, nobody had had a Sumatran rhino pregnant before, so they weren’t quite sure how long they had to wait!

So turns out 16 months—it takes 16 months to make a rhino baby. So 16 months later, on Dall’s was born! He was born in 2001. Three years later, they had a little girl named Suchi, and then three years after that, in 2007, Harapan was born!

So eventually, Harapan's mom and dad passed away, and his sister died of a disease called iron storage disease, which is a significant issue for rhinos. But on Dall, Harapan’s older brother, went back to the SRS in 2007, and he is now the father of two calves there—Dali and Delilah—you saw Delilah doing some photo bombs in the background there in the videos!

Then, in 2015, the very difficult decision was made to move Harapan back to Indonesia, and this was moving the last Sumatran rhino out of the United States! But he moved in Asia. It was a 53-hour journey for him. They rented out an entire ferry because they didn’t want to put him on a short flight, and so they drove the truck into the ferry. He had the whole truck by himself because they didn’t want to give him exhaust fumes or anything like that and drove him through the middle of the night into the SRS!

He is a happy camper there. He’s put on weight! He’s loving being in his natural environment, and we are currently working on getting a Harapan baby! But it hasn’t happened yet, so he’s practicing with some of the females there. So if everybody could wish Harapan good luck, we need it! Hopefully, we’ll have some more rhino babies soon.

Kira Milam: It seems like all the lessons learned back in the '80s about the reproductive biology are now being applied to the current effort of making more Sumatran rhino babies!

CeCe Vurt: Absolutely! Without the years of research and studying and husbandry and care of these animals, we wouldn’t be able to succeed!

Kathryn Workman: Yep! That’s great! Good story! Kira, I’m thinking that we might have some folks in the crowd that are perhaps skeptical of the approach and wonder, “You know, there are so few of them. Is this a last-ditch effort to save this species?”

Kira Milam: First of all, how would you respond to them? And then if you would also put it in the broader context of other captive propagation efforts to save endangered species?

Kira Milam: Sure, Katherine! What I would say to them is that the state of the species that we share this planet with is in crisis! We’ve heard from the UN report a few weeks ago that there are a million species slipping towards extinction!

So we are seeing this situation with more and more species. But the good news is that we know that it works! There are a number of species now that have been brought back from very small numbers. For example, the Mauritius Kestrel—back in 1970, there were just four birds left, four breeding pairs.

But thanks to the dedicated, coordinated efforts of a team of people, they were able to breed those birds and get them back, and now there are 300 flying Mauritian kestrels! The scimitar-horned oryx, similarly, was declared extinct in the wild by IUCN in 2000. Thanks to a really coordinated effort by the governments, by teams of zoos all around the world and by global expert communities, they’ve been reintroducing scimitar-horned oryx now back into Chad, and there are now 100 individuals, and they’re on track to reach a goal of 500 back in the wild in the next few years!

So we know that this happens; there’s a longer list of black-footed ferrets, American bison, Californian condor—many of them are stories that we know. But the trick is really working together as one team, all of us fighting to save species from extinction around the world! The end game, the point of success, is having healthy populations back in the wild in thriving habitats with functioning ecosystems.

But there are many different tools that we need to use and many different types of expertise to get us there, and often, when we just work with one organization or with our core community, we tend to use the techniques we’re most familiar with or the ones that we’re strongest in.

So what we really need is these collaborations that bring different expertise together, and sometimes, that’s habitat protection; sometimes, it’s anti-poaching patrols; sometimes it’s bringing them into human care. Often, it’s a combination of all of those.

And what we do see quite often is a hesitation to bring animals into human care as though it's some implication that we've failed at protecting them in the wild! But we’ve just heard from CeCe that this is a science; it takes a long time and lots of really dedicated expertise to figure out how to capture an animal, how to keep it alive, how to care for it, how to breed it, how it performs reproductively—there’s lots of nuance into that and we need—we need time, we need time and experts working together to figure out those solutions.

We have recently seen some devastating consequences of what happens when we leave it too late. There was an example just two years ago now: a little Melanesian rodent off of the island off the coast of northeastern Australia. The island was going underwater because of rising sea levels, and they knew this, and the habitat for this mouse was shrinking.

The scientific community and the government community debated what to do about this for five years. They finally decided to bring some into human care. It took six months to approve the permits, and a few weeks before the expedition to go and capture some of these mice, a huge storm surge came and washed the island underwater and we’ve lost that species! Similarly, the vaquita porpoise is a very small porpoise in the Gulf of California. Many of you will know that really harrowing story!

We waited until there were 30 individuals left, and we didn’t know a thing about how to capture them, how to keep them alive, how to breed them, and despite really valiant, incredible efforts from a global team, that effort is currently not succeeding. With that, the future of that porpoise is really an instrument here that we know.

It can work; it really does! We just need to work together as a collaboration, and we need to start early. We can’t wait until it’s the Eleventh Hour!

Kathryn Workman: Yeah, sense of urgency is definitely pressing! Thank you! Okay, so Colby, what is the state of the Sumatran rhino rescue effort? Where are y'all right now in the project? And what does it look like for the next five years of this partnership?

Colby Bishop: So right now, in the three areas in Indonesia where we know there are rhinos in the wild, we’re doing surveys to figure out where exactly the best places to dig the pit traps to rescue them and bring them into the sanctuaries. This conversation wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t acknowledge Pahu, who is the rhino on the screen here. Pahu is our first official rescue from the project back in November.

She was living in a mining concession area in the Kalimantan region of Indonesia, so we rescued her from there, and now she has been relocated to a sanctuary in that same region, and she is happy and healthy! You can tell she’s happy, because she’s wallowing in the mud here, and that means she’s doing just great!

So really our goal is that we’ll bring in more rhinos. We’ll start to really understand exactly where they are, we’ll bring more in, and as Kira mentioned, the end goal is not to have Pahu and a bunch of rhinos in a sanctuary forever. The goal is eventually to release them back into their natural ecosystem!

And we’re also giving up on protection; we’re continuing to protect the natural forests and we have partners including the WWF and Rhino Foundation of Indonesia and Rudy’s organization—the fellow you just talked about—they’re out there day after day, 24/7 in the forests, deactivating snares, ensuring that rhinos are safe! They’re not just protecting rhinos; they’re protecting elephants, they're protecting tigers, they’re protecting scores of primates and birds and amphibians.

These men and women are out 24/7, and we’re ensuring that their habitat remains safe through them, so that when we do increase the population, we will have a place to release them to! Definitely, it really truly is a proactive, one-plan approach!

I mean, we’re working with collaborative partners all over, using decades of science and expertise and really making sure that we’re setting up this Sumatran rhino to succeed in the long term! I think that’s what’s different about this project, and I really think that we’re setting up— I have a dream team for Sumatran rhinos, all working from the same playbook to ensure that this project is different, and we do bring this Sumatran rhino back from the brink!

Kathryn Workman: What a wonderful note to end on—that conservation can be done in a different way, in a united, coordinated way with government, with implementing partners, with the conservation community fully united on this! Thank you!

I know that people in the audience are probably thinking, “How can I help?” Well, what you can do is tell your friends about this small, singing, hairy rhino! And then visit our website here: SumatranRhinoRescue.org to find out other ways that you can get involved!

I want to thank Rudy Putra remotely and our wonderful panel here, and all of you for listening! Thank you!

[Applause]

Wonderful! That was incredible, wasn't it? Now why don't we give another big round of applause to that rhino? He's hanging out in the back with us! So, that’s one of the most incredible things about the...