News and Stories

Today is National Endangered Species Day. At the Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW) at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, steps are taken each day to conserve endangered, vulnerable, and rare species. In the Plant Research Division, seeds, spores, and tissues of at-risk plant species are frozen using liquid nitrogen and banked in CREW’s CryoBioBank, where they can be stored for many years to come. This serves as insurance in case species are lost in the wild. Plants are also grown in test tubes in a living plant tissue culture collection which can be used to support restoration in their native habitat. By using these methods, it’s possible to preserve the biodiversity of a species, which allows scientists to protect against species extinction. CREW’s Plant Research Division works with numerous species that are listed as federally endangered under the Endangered Species Act, but also many other threatened, rare, and at-risk species! Since the establishment of the CREW Plant Lab in the 1980’s, scientists have used cryopreservation and in-vitro tissue culture techniques to conserve a diverse range of species of every conservation status!

Here are some examples of plants that are preserved in CREW’s CryoBioBank and tissue culture collection:

Critically Endangered:

Melicope mucronulata, or Alani, is a critically endangered plant, with only three plants left surviving in its native habitat on Molokaʻi and Maui. This plant is cryopreserved in CREW’s CryoBioBank.

Endangered:

Trillium persistens, or Persistent Trillium, is found in only a few locations in Georgia and South Carolina and has been listed as endangered since 1978. This is the first species that CREW’s Plant Research Division propagated using tissue culture in the 1980s!

Hedeoma todsenii, or Todsen’s Pennyroyal, is an endangered species that grows on the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. This species is cryopreserved for long term storage and is growing in-vitro in CREW’s tissue culture collection.

Threatened:

Quercus hinckleyi, or Hinckley’s oak, is a federally threatened oak species that is only found in the Chihuahuan Desert of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. This is one of the oaks the Plant Conservation Division grows in tissue culture! To learn more about CREW’s Oak Research, check out this article!

Least Concern:

CREW doesn’t just have at-risk species in tissue culture! Quercus macrocarpa, or Bur Oak, is a common oak species native to central and eastern North America. It is grown in CREW’s tissue culture collection and used in oak research.

De-Listed:

Arenaria cumberlandensis, native to Southern Kentucky and Northern Tennessee, was once considered endangered but was delisted in 2021 thanks to successful long-term restoration efforts. Endangered or threatened species can be delisted from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Plants if their populations recover enough to survive on their own in the wild and no longer require federal protection. Read more about CREW’s role in restoring Arenaria cumberlandensis here!