Ex situ conservation
Modern policies of zoo associations and zoos around the world have begun putting dramatically increased emphasis on keeping and breeding wild-sourced species and subspecies of animals in their registered endangered species breeding programs. These specimens are intended to have a chance to be reintroduced and survive back in the wild. The main objectives of zoos today have changed, and greater resources are being invested in breeding species and subspecies for then ultimate purpose of assisting conservation efforts in the wild. Zoos do this by maintaining extremely detailed scientific breeding records (i.e. studbooks)) and by loaning their wild animals to other zoos around the country (and often globally) for breeding, to safeguard against inbreeding by attempting to maximize genetic diversity however possible.
Costly (and sometimes controversial) ex-situ conservation techniques aim to increase the genetic biodiversity on our planet, as well as the diversity in local gene pools. by guarding against genetic erosion. Modern concepts like seedbanks, sperm banks, and tissue banks have become much more commonplace and valuable. Sperm, eggs, and embryos can now be frozen and kept in banks, which are sometimes called "Modern Noah's Arks" or "Frozen Zoos". Cryopreservation techniques are used to freeze these living materials and keep them alive in perpetuity by storing them submerged in liquid nitrogen tanks at very low temperatures. Thus, preserved materials can then be used for artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, and cloning methodologies to protect diversity in the gene pool of critically endangered species.
It can be possible to save an endangered species from extinction by preserving only parts of specimens, such as tissues, sperm, eggs, etc. – even after the death of a critically endangered animal, or collected from one found freshly dead, in captivity or from the wild. A new specimen can then be "resurrected" with the help of cloning, so as to give it another chance to breed its genes into the living population of the respective threatened species. Resurrection of dead critically endangered wildlife specimens with the help of cloning is still being perfected, and is still too expensive to be practical, but with time and further advancements in science and methodology it may well become a routine procedure not to far into the future.
Recently, strategies for finding an integrated approach to in situ and ex situ conservation techniques have been given considerable attention, and progress is being made.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_erosion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_wild_relative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilov_center
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_bank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_fragmentation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_pool
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overexploitation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed_registry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed_registry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Cat_Association
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