Question

There are many animals that have become extinct in the wild but continue to be maintained in zoological parks.
A. What type of biodiversity conservation is observed in this case?
B. Explain any other two-ways which help in this type of conservation.

Answer 1

Hint: Biodiversity encompasses variability and variety of all forms of life on earth and plays a great role in human existence. Its conservation embraces maintenance, restoration and sustainable utilization of the degraded and lost biodiversity through two basic and complementary strategies.

Complete answer:
A. Ex situ conservation is used to conserve all levels of biological diversity outside natural habitats through various techniques like zoo, aquarium, botanical garden, captive breeding and gene bank. It plays a major role in raising awareness, communicating the issues and gaining widespread political and public support for conservation actions and for the breeding endangered species in captivity for reintroduction. Limitations of ex situ conservation are: deterioration of genetic diversity, adaptations to captivity, inbreeding depression and accumulation of deleterious alleles. One of the richest centers of genetic resources in the world is Ethiopia. Currently, a number of stakeholders or actors are actively working on biodiversity conservation through these techniques by establishing gene banks, zoos and botanical gardens.
B. Biotechnological methods, such as plant tissue culture, cryopreservation are useful techniques for the ex situ plant conservation and sustainable resource utilization. In cryopreservation, living tissues are conserved at very low temperatures in liquid nitrogen to arrest metabolic and mitotic activities. It is now realized that cryopreservation method is a cost effective conservation of plant genetic resources, including the orthodox seeds and can offer greater security for long-term.
The ex-situ conservation strategies include botanical gardens, seedling, zoological gardens; conservation stands for pollen seed and gene, tissue culture and DNA banks. Plant tissue culture technology has been increasingly applied for germplasm conservation, micro propagation, and genetic improvement in diverse plant species. Tissue culture is the growth of cells or tissues in an artificial medium separate from parent organism. This technique is also known as micro-propagation. This is typically facilitated via use of a semi-solid, solid, or liquid growth medium, such as agar or broth.

Note: The other type of conservation is in situ conservation. In situ conservation is described as the conservation of natural habitats and ecosystems, the maintenance of viable populations of species in their natural surroundings. In situ conservation can be done in fields, protected areas and pasture lands.