Dr. Holly Reed Conservation Fund

Many shark species are declining around the world, but to protect them we need to understand them, and their habitat and behavior – especially females. With our support, researchers from the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology outfit female scalloped hammerhead sharks with satellite tracking tags to inform fisheries management. Point Defiance Zoo staff aquarists have traveled to Hawaii to participate in the project, learning tagging techniques and providing skilled water safety support to the team.

Sharks are often misunderstood – especially by fishing communities. In this collaborative project, Point Defiance Zoo staff members work with staff from marine non-profit MarAlliance to develop education strategies, curriculum and community engagement in Central America to foster stewardship for sharks and other marine animals.

All seven of the world’s sea turtle species are threatened or endangered. They eat plastic trash, get entangled in nets, are caught as bycatch or suffer poaching and habitat destruction. With two green sea turtles now at home in the Pacific Seas Aquarium, we’re helping to protect their wild cousins. Funded projects include tracking female eastern Pacific green turtles in Colola, Michoacán México to determine and protect feeding sites and engaging local fishing communities in Northern Sinaloa, Mexico, in monitoring and conserving sea turtles.

Only a few hundred Sumatran tigers remain in the wild on their native Indonesian island of Sumatra. We care for Sumatran tigers here in our zoo, but we also support the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ (AZA’s) Tiger Conservation Campaign. Wildlife Response Units on Sumatra work with villages to address human-tiger conflict, reduce poaching and prevent illegal habitat loss.

They’re shy and elusive. They’re so difficult to spot in their rapidly disappearing rainforest habitat that no one knows for sure how many endangered clouded leopards remain in the wild. But we all agree the species is in trouble. Point Defiance Zoo works with partners across the nation and in Thailand on a breeding and research program that is crucial to ongoing understanding and conservation of these exotic cats. In addition, we’ve funded studies to fit satellite tracking collars on clouded leopards in Borneo and capture their movements via motion-sensing cameras in Thailand’s Phu Khieo Wildlife Sanctuary. These studies provide crucial information about saving this species for the future.

Development of Asian elephant habitat has led to increased contact between people and wild elephants. Through the Dr. Holly Reed Conservation Fund, we support Conservation Response Units in Sumatra that address that conflict. Formerly neglected elephants are trained to carry forest rangers into elephant territory to fight crime, rescue wildlife, reduce elephant-human conflict by herding wild elephants away from settlements, and provide education and outreach programs to people living in villages in and around the parks.

As climate change intensifies, polar bears are increasingly threatened. These massive mammals depend on sea ice platforms for catching the seals that are their main source of food. We support testing of new methods of attaching GPS tracking devices to wild polar bears. The new adhesive is first tested on zoo bears and then on wild bears, allowing critical research on how polar bears are impacted by loss of sea ice due to climate change.