Robin's Nest from American Humane - Dr. Dante Fenolio, Vice President of Conservation and Research at the San Antonio Zoo

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

In this episode of Robin’s Nest, Georgia Boyer fills in for Robin and hosts Dr. Dante Fenolio, Vice President of Conservation and Research at the San Antonio Zoo. Dr. Fenolio started in 2013 and has built an incredibly successful conservation program. He has published more than 35 peer-reviewed articles along with two books. He is also utilizing cutting-edge technology to pursue some very interesting projects.

Welcome to Robin's Nest. So many of us have a deep connection with the animals around us and want to protect them from the pets in our homes to endangered species in the wild. That's why I joined American Humane. As one of the oldest and most effective animal protection groups, we help billions of animals around the world. Join us as we explore how we can build a more humane world together. Today's episode is hosted by Georgia Boyer, my communications colleague at American Humane, who is a longtime animal lover. I'm so excited to introduce you to our guest today, Dr. Dante Finolio. Dr. Finolio is the vice president of conservation and research at the San Antonio Zoo. He started in 2013 and since has built a successful conservation program.

Dr. Finolio has had more than 35 peer-reviewed writings published along with two books and some very interesting projects using cutting-edge technologies that you'll hear about today. Let's listen to his conversation with Georgia. Good morning, Dr. Finoglio, and welcome to Robin's Nest. We're so happy that we could squeeze you in today. How are you? Great. Thank you so much for having me. We're so glad that we could make this work. So let's just jump right on into it. You have done so much work in the conservation field, but something that's very unique to you is you focus on the educational outreach portion of your work. Can you talk to our viewers today about

all that you do in that aspect of your work? I've always tried to emphasize education and outreach because if we don't bring in the next generation, all is lost, right? I mean, it's so critical. I have always looked to promote STEM fields, particularly with women, right? Because for decades and decades and decades, there's been this crazy imbalance. It's writing, the ship is, is getting righted right now for sure. But, um, it's, but particularly bringing kids in, um, at an early age, getting them exposure to wildlife and wild places is so important. Um, if you don't have those early childhood experiences, I just don't think you imprint on it. And I know that sounds strange, but I think that I look at my background and I started as a kid. I grew up in the mountains of California in the Santa Cruz area and I was chasing Santa Cruz, you know, long-toed salamanders and giant salamanders and red-legged frogs from as far

back as my memory can go. But it was the early childhood experience that connected, made that connection, and it's lasted a lifetime. So when we do our projects, I try to make sure that we go the extra mile as far as we can to make materials available to kids. For example, with the Deep End Project in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, where we're looking at the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the Pelagic community, in other words, the community of wildlife living in the water column. What we did is we hired a an animation artist and we invented a little cartoon squid character squirt the squid and we would have this um animation artist make short uh 10 15 20 second uh cartoon skits where squirt would come out and talk about why a particular fish had big teeth or why another one would glow in the dark.

And we set up this website. We also hired a specialist, a biologist, a very good friend of mine who makes teaching modules. And so she would make teaching modules for grade one, grade two, grade three, and we would stack them up in this website. And they're free for download to anybody who wants them. And then we've got these little animated segments where sport comes out and can interact with the kids. So that very specifically was directed at children and promoting STEM fields.

And you don't have any better material than fish with giant teeth that glow in the dark, right? I mean, that's going to- Absolutely not. Yeah. And any child would love that. Yes. Yeah. So I cheated a little bit because we had material that was already going to sort of be interesting to kids. Oh, absolutely. I love that. And I love the name, Squirt the Squid. Yeah. Yeah, it worked out. So- Yeah. That's fabulous. And that aligns perfectly with American Humane. Dr. Robin Ganser always says that you can't protect what you don't love and you can't love what you don't know. So it's so important to educate these children so that they're aware of all that's out there in this world and all the beautiful things that there are.

that's out there in this world and all the beautiful things that there are. So we commend you very much for your great work and spreading the education when it comes to conservation, but let's jump into conservation now. So you've done a lot of great work. What's, what's the, what's a piece that you're most proud of? Okay. So when, when I was a kid, my dad would take me to biology seminars at the university of California at Berkeley. And, uh, in, in one of those seminar series, I'd met a biologist who was working in the upper Amazon basin for some unknown reason. He took me under his wing and we started communicating regularly and as high school wound down um i started working for him in the amazon basin doing reptile and amphibian

surveys and spent the next 15 summers doing that uh so i've i spent a lot of time particularly out on indigenous lands, where this mentor had pre-existing relationships with the indigenous communities such that they would let us out onto their land to look and make these big faunal surveys focusing on reptiles and amphibians. So over the years, you can well imagine you spend that kind of time out there. You develop a lot of interpersonal relationships with the indigenous communities. I can tell you right off the bat, nobody can tell you more about the forest than the folks that live in the forest, right? Right. I can go sit at the best university with the best seminars and the best professors.

Nothing is going to bring you to understand a forest like the people living there. Yep, absolutely. Lots of years, lots of time, those relationships developed. And then as I got a little older, I got into the literature and I recognized hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed into the Amazon under the guise of rainforest conservation with very, very little to show for it. There are some reserves and there are some things that have been success stories, but the average project that goes there fails. And what I came to find was that fundamentally the approach by the West is off kilter because we take

our system and our line of thinking and we superimpose it onto the indigenous community, which is not fair. Some of the indigenous communities I work with, there's not even a word for a contract. They don't even have a word for it. But we do. And we have really high expectations when you offer somebody money in exchange for something else and you've got this contract. And that's a really bad way to do things, right? I mean, you're dealing with a Western concept and you're dealing with indigenous communities that don't really have a history with that. They're fully cognizant of the fact that if they lose their forests, they lose their way of life. They don't want that, right? But it's also not that easy. Cash is in short supply in the upper Amazon basin. And when you need something like Western

medical attention or medicines, you've got to pay for them. So those are kind of pinch points where if your family's sick, you're going to sell logging rights or mineral rights or oil extraction rights because your family's sick. I would do the same thing. But if we can set up a system, they don't want a big chunk of money at any given point in time. They want a stable, predictable revenue stream, but one that they can scale depending on what's going on in the community. depending on what's going on in the community. So what we devised was that they would carve small animals out of balsa wood. Balsa is a non-threatened tree from the Amazon. You can go from a seedling to a full-sized tree in a year or two. It's a very fast-growing, almost a weed. It's a lightweight wood. So when you carve a little animal from it, I can load a whole suitcase with

those little animals and bring them back to the zoo for our gift stores. And it's not a lightweight wood. So when you carve a little animal from it, I can load a whole suitcase with those little animals and bring them back to the zoo for our gift stores. And it's not a heavy bag. Right. I made sure that there were no seeds or teeth or feathers, nothing that would get anybody in, you know, break a rule, just carved animals. And the deal is I have a crew in the Amazon and we bought a boat

and they'll visit these remote indigenous communities once a month. And if they want to sell us 50 of these carved animals, fine. If it's 5,000, fine. Price is set. They can scale it accordingly. And we go through that regular exercise on a monthly basis. But as you can well imagine, having a team in the Amazon, having a base of operations and a boat, that's all really expensive, right? So we've gone about mitigating those expenses a couple different ways. We've got partner zoos and aquariums, things like the Roger Williams Park Zoo, Moody Gardens, Texas A&M, San Antonio, Moody Gardens, Texas A&M, San Antonio, Snake Farm, those kinds of places have partnered with us so that we can share the expense load across institutions rather than all on the shoulders of one. There's another thing I've really focused on in my career, building conservation programs to

last. You have to be really careful to build something that can go past me. I don't believe it's conservation. If I go out today and I get hit by a Mack truck and the project ends, is it really conservation? Because it ended. So one safeguard to that is aligning multiple institutions that all have the same goals and mission. And then making sure that because there are so many of them involved, if any one backed out or any one individual backed out, the probability of it crashing is much lower. So we've enhanced the community that is part of, we call this project Selva. So I asked myself, what is it we're trying to celebrate? Clearly, it's the biodiversity in these forests. There are levels of biodiversity that rival any other corner of the planet in the

upper Amazon basin in those rainforests. That's our goal, to save those forests, working with the people that live in those forests. And then I asked myself, okay, well, what aspect of that, of the biodiversity really stands out? Well, there are more species of freshwater fish in the upper Amazon basin than any other corner of the planet. We're at about 2,500 species now. Once the taxonomists are all done, everybody's estimate is that we'll be well north of 5,000 species. So it's an incredibly biodiverse area with drainage systems and in species diversity that's really unprecedented, unrivaled. So then I asked myself, okay, is there another culture around the globe that really celebrates fish? And immediately Japanese gyutaku or fish printing came to mind. This beautiful ancient

art form where long before there were cameras, Japanese fishermen would ink their catch and press it out with rice paper and then have a permanent record of what they caught. And then, of course, over hundreds of years, that turned into the beautiful art that it is today with people finishing it out, coloring in the eyes. So we built an art studio in our offices and I flew in a Japanese gyutaku specialist who held workshops for six young, really enthusiastic artists, Peruvian artists. I'm proud to say most of them are women in a corner of the world where there aren't a lot of professional opportunities for women. So this is just a great platform. And now they crank out these fish prints. They'll go to the market, buy something for dinner,

ink it, press it out, wash it off, have dinner, and then finish those prints out. And we bring them to North America and we sell them in art shows and gift stores. And we export them to Europe and Asia for sale there. And it doesn't yet pay for the entire project, but it really helps offset some of the costs. Wow. I tip my hat offset some of the costs. Wow.

I tip my hat to all of the people that I'm working with. I am lucky to have this team of people that have really made this a reality. I don't want to say that I made it a reality, the team did, including the indigenous communities that we work with that are dedicated to keeping the stands of rainforest that they have on their traditional lands. dedicated to keeping the stands of rainforest that they have on their traditional lands. Yes, absolutely. And that's something you should surely be proud of. And it's so innovative as well. You are able to get the buy-in from so many different people and organizations to make it work so that it will be everlasting. So that's truly special. I am incredibly blessed to work with a team here at San Antonio Zoo that gets it, right? I can say for sure, all the way down to the folks in our accounting department, everybody is working towards a common goal.

There's no way any of this would have happened without that team. Yeah. No, and I agree with you. I think with every conservationist we've spoken to on this podcast, it takes a village. It's a lot of people need to be involved and that's how you can or how we can all fight the sixth mass extinction. Yes, ma'am. were most proud of, I would say definitely includes some innovation as far as that goes. You've done a lot of things outside of the box, and you just spoke to that beautifully. But you also incorporate a lot of technology into some of your work. Can you speak to that and how that's helping you? I've always been attracted to sort of cutting edge technology dating back to when I was a kid.

And so we use drones regularly, even when we're out at sea to capture what we're doing, right? And develop that STEM message, right? Because that footage is incredible and it's impressive. If you've got a pod of 500 dolphins going by and you get great drone footage, maybe that's one more kid you can bring into the biology fold because they see some footage that lights some kind of fireastomer tattoos. And what we do is we mark them so that if we recapture them in a subsequent study during a mark recapture study, we know where they've moved, how they've grown. We can start addressing population ecology for species that we really don't know much about. And I can't really help them if I don't know much about their basic population ecology. How quickly are they breeding? How much habitat do they use? What's their growth rate? How many babies do they have? So I need to be able to identify

particular individuals. So we started using this Northwest Marine Technology product, and we started doing or using these acrylic elastomer tattoos. And full disclosure, I didn't want to do anything to wildlife that I wasn't willing to do to myself. And I still have my little acrylic elastomer tattoos in my hand. Fair is fair. If I'm going to do it to them, I'm going to do it to myself. I love that. You hit it with a black light, and everybody freaks out. to do it to myself. And I love that, right? You hit it with a black light and everybody freaks out. So using these technologies really is teaching us so much. And I have the great privilege of,

I have another PhD on my staff, Dr. Andy Glusenkamp, and he works with environmental DNA. And a lot of times you can't readily access subterranean wildlife, particularly things that live in aquifers. There are human accessible portions of that habitat, but you sure can get water samples out of it. So if you can take those water samples and filter them through and then look for the DNA of these incredibly rare creatures or uncommonly encountered creatures, then we know where they are and where they're not. And we can start filling in the boxes with regard to range and where we need to focus our conservation efforts on the surface. I love the use of contemporary technologies. And a lot of times I've got collaborators all over the world and they have labs full of brilliant students that'll be using some kind of technology that I've never even heard of before. We'll wrap

it into a project. Why not? Let's pick up as much data as we possibly can per unit effort. Yeah. I love that mindset and it makes such a difference and it almost helps speed up the process as well with all of your studies. So that's amazing. Now let's talk about zoos and aquariums, the importance of them and how much they have changed over the past couple of years or even decade. Absolutely. So you're talking to somebody who did not come from a zoo and aquarium background. I was little nerd, academic, planning on taking up a post at probably a teaching university and teaching and doing research. And that was it.

And sort of fell into the role of conservation biology with zoos and aquariums and botanical gardens and have never looked back. I mean, I love what I do. I love where I work. And I can really engage conservation efforts from this platform where I don't think I could have the same way from a university setting. The thing that I really want people to know or think about about zoos and aquariums, a lot of folks, you look at the criticisms and, oh, well, they're entertainment venues. And my response is, okay, they started as entertainment venues. You see them very quickly moving into the critical role of conservation.

And lo and behold, they have some tools that no other conservation stakeholder brings to the table. So they have highly trained staff at keeping wildlife alive in controlled settings. They've got the facilities to do that, right? But here's something that most people don't think of. Over 700 million people a year annually visit zoos and aquariums. That's more than all professional sporting events in the United States combined annually. That's a lot of folks. So that public interface, that is more than any other conservation stakeholder. It's more than most other conservation stakeholders combined. So that's a really important opportunity for education and outreach, delivering conservation messages and talking to the general public about why these things are important. There are a couple other really,

really important points that I think most people overlook. So zoos and aquariums, fine. They're an entertainment venue. People go there with their entertainment dollars and a portion of every ticket goes to a conservation effort now in something like an AZA zoo. There is no other conservation stakeholder that's able to reroute funds from something like entertainment funds that a family set aside to conservation. They're not competing for resources. It's an additive effect.

And in fact, some of our greatest collaborators on our conservation efforts are places like Nature Conservancy. We're involved with them all over North America, and they're a wonderful partner. But we don't compete at all for a revenue source. So I think zoos and aquariums really help bring money in from a place where it otherwise wouldn't have been available for conservation. And I think that you see zoos and aquariums taking bigger and bigger steps. They're learning as they grow, and they're moving into collaborations with indigenous communities. They're moving into collaborations.

We're the only zoo that's part of the Deep End Project out in the Gulf of Mexico. There are over 50 other institutions. All of the rest of them are universities and museums. So you see zoos and aquariums stepping into places where they traditionally don't have a footprint. I'm very proud of that. And I also like to remind people with zoos and aquariums, a lot of the detractors will say, well, they really haven't done anything. Somebody who says that has not done their homework and they haven't looked

into the history. And I will go no farther than the American bison. It would have vanished. And the only place people could see them would be on, you know, in the pages of the book on extinction had the Bronx Zoo not stepped in. San Diego Zoo has similar success stories with other species, you know, California condors and things like that. Blackfooted ferret. I mean, it's the list is unfortunately growing and we have to look at the realities on the ground. on the ground. And when I hear some of the vitriol and some of the anger that's pointed at zoos and aquariums, a lot of it comes from people that I'm quite sure haven't spent the time out in wild places. I can tell you I've spent most of my life in places where there weren't people around. And I know exactly what the problems are. And I know exactly how the current solutions are being applied. Labeling zoos and aquariums as bad won't help anybody. And they bring a lot to the table that really changes the dynamics

of how a conservation initiative can function and last through time. So I'm a huge proponent now, and I didn't come from the community. Yeah. And having an expert like you advocating for that and sharing your knowledge is key because a lot of it is just people don't understand or know. So thank you for sharing that with everyone. It makes a difference. Thank you. Is there anything else that you'd love to add in here? Anything that you're currently working on?

You know, I like to wrap these up with just my, and I'll try to keep this short, my spiel on biodiversity, because a lot of folks, well-intentioned folks, come to the zoo and they'll ask a very, very valid question. Why should I care? Why do I care if this little blind cave fish that I'm never going to see blinks out? Why should I care if this little frog on this remote mountain side blinks out. And what I like to remind people, and I don't like boiling biodiversity into what humans can get out, that I want to start with this background and baseline. My personal belief system is that every species has a right to be here. We don't have a right to take it out. Where I'm going with this is that I'm fully cognizant of the fact that a lot of

people need a stronger argument. So I'm going to hand them a really pragmatic argument right now. Love it. Humanity is losing its battle with antibiotic-resisted bacteria at a terrible rate, right? So we're down to one antibiotic that can fight the bacteria that causes strep throat, right? And that's vancomycin. And about 15% of those strains are now resistant to vancomycin. So in real world terms, to your listener out there, what does that mean? That means you could go into a hospital, contract one of these antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, and 10 days later, you die in the hospital and nobody can do anything about it. So we're running out

of antibiotics because over time and a lot of misuse, a lot of bacterial strains have developed the ability to be completely resistant to most of the antibiotics we have on our shelves. So the next step is, well, where are our next antibiotics going to come from? And if you look at where most medicines have come from with humanity, it's biodiversity, right? So I guarantee you, your viewers out there watching, they know somebody who's on an ACE inhibitor that came from the venom of a viper from Brazil. If they've ever taken aspirin from the bark of a tree, if they've ever taken penicillin or any of its derivatives, a little green mold that grows

on food in the back of your refrigerator that you forgot about. So, um, Tayshobacter, one of our, our most exciting, um, uh, prospects for a new antibiotic, it came from a soil bacteria. So the day before any of these discoveries were made, the average person out of there would have assessed any of those species as a zero in terms of importance. But there's so much going on, particularly venom research. The leading candidate for treating breast cancer in humans is a component from the southern copperheads venom. So another species that nobody would elect to have living at their front door. But we don't, here's the thing, I wrote about this in my last book, Life in the Dark, we don't get to pick and choose the species that'll

hand us the next advancement, right? It could come from anywhere and quite frequently it comes from things that aren't warm and cuddly. It comes from things that are venomous or toxic. If we think about amphibians and amphibian skin secretions, they've had to fight microbes for millennia. And in producing these toxic skin secretions, they're killing antibiotic resistant, even antibiotic resistant bacterial strains. even antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains. So the difference now is that we have to keep biodiversity around so we have the treasure chest to pull from as our technology advances, and I call it technological constraint. Today's technologies may not be able to analyze skin secretion from all the frogs, or they might not be able to do it in an efficient way, 10 years from now, they most certainly will be able to. Think about the changes in your cell phone over the past five years, over the past 10 years. That's how quickly we're advancing.

So as we advance, our technology will allow us to look for these things more efficiently and very quickly, but we can't lose the treasure chest that we'll use to pull these new compounds from. So my bottom line is every species is of value. You can't say that anything is without value because tomorrow's technology may tell us something different. And there's lots of really good examples of that. So humanity is really attached at the hip with biodiversity in a profound way. And if we let it go, I guarantee you we will go to. Yep. I love it. And I love your passion. Thank you for sharing that. And again, it goes back to our first question. It's all about educating the masses and people understanding. So we really appreciate your time. It's so impactful

to hear from a specialist and conservationist like yourself. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm glad we got to make this happen. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being with us today and being part of Robin's Nest. Here's some of my Nest members right here with Mr. Darcy.

Special thanks to Georgia for hosting these incredible guests today and being part of Robin's Nest. But most of all, we are grateful for you. Thank you for listening to this episode, and we look forward to providing more information and content on how we can together build a more humane world.