Galapagos Marine Iguanas in Zoos

I put some videos I had taken of Galapagos Marine Iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) on YouTube in 2012. I then had a number of requests from the sort of thick-as-two-short-planks individuals who inhabit that world asking me to tell them where they could buy one.

Export of Galapagos fauna is prohibited by Ecuador and I thought there were none in captivity. Therefore, I was surprised recently to see a Marine Iguana in a video taken by a group of German zoo enthusiasts who were visiting a zoo in Japan in 2016. There have also been reports of some being kept in East Africa.

It would appear that smuggling of Land and Marine Iguanas, if not rife, has been going on. It would be very easy given a small vessel to pick up and ship out Land and Marine Iguanas from many of the islands, just as expedition vessels did in the early decades of the 20th century.

Marine Iguana on Isabella

Marine Iguanas were being traded in the 1960s. A dealer in Florida had some, and small numbers appeared in zoos including Belle Vue in Manchester. Few survived for more than a few weeks, a repeat of attempts to keep them in the 1930s.

However, Brookfield Zoo in Chicago managed to keep four Marine Iguanas for several years, the last dying after being there for over six*. They had been obtained from a dealer in Florida. Re-reading the article by Ray Pawley in the 1966 edition of International Zoo Yearbook on these iguanas I am surprised by this relative success since the conditions in captivity seem very different from those in the wild. They had a small pool with fresh, not sea, water. The humidity was high. However, the key requirements—heat lamps for basking, ultraviolet lamps for vitamin D synthesis—were there. Initially, the iguanas refused all food (as in most zoos up to that time) but Pawley had the idea of putting a Green Iguana into the cage. It settled in and fed immediately, as then did three of the Marine Iguanas on the third day!

Marine iguanas scrape marine algae and any adherent plant and animal life from rocks. Seaweed had been tried in unsuccessful attempts to keep them in captivity. Pawley made up a mixture of chopped vegetables, fruit, meat plus vitamins and minerals. He added some reconstituted kelp. Sea water was sprinkled over this mixture and onto rocks in the cage. This is what the iguanas ate  along with with nibbles at plants growing in the cage and some green algae which grew on the rocks. Those who know how to keep Green Iguanas will realise that this mixture, minus the kelp and salt water, would suit just about any mainly herbivorous iguana.

Illustration from Pawley's article in International Zoo Yearbook

The regime was obviously successful since the animals grew and Pawley later reported a great deal of aggression in what must have been the males.

In the same edition of International Zoo Yearbook, Frankfurt Zoo in Germany is listed as also having four Marine Iguanas. I have no information of how they were kept or what became of them.

*I have found wildly differing reports of longevity in the wild; from 5-12 years up to 60.

Pawley R. 1966. Observations on the care and nutrition of a captive group of Marine Iguanas Amblyrhynchus cristatus. International Zoo Yearbook 6, 107-115.

The full list of Pawley’s papers on these animals in in:

Murphy JB. 2015. Studies on Lizards and Tuataras in Zoos and Aquariums. Part I—Introduction, History, Families Iguanidae, Agamidae, Chamaeleonidae, and Infraorder Gekkota. Herpetological Reviews 46, 464-482.

‘I believe it to be impossible to breed genuine wild animal under artificial conditions as to stand in a bucket of water and pick oneself up’. Helen Spurway’s original and neglected work from 1952

The breeding of wild animals in captivity is managed to maintain genetic diversity. Everybody knows that from television programmes on zoos, even after stripping out the anthropomorphic claptrap of the populist commentary. But even with the best management there is a limit to the number of generations that small populations can be maintained without incurring the deleterious effects of inbreeding. And when it comes to reintroducing populations into the wild is the gene pool the same as that in the original wild population? In other words, has there been artificial selection, however unintentional, so is the captive population genuinely wild?

There have been many papers and books written on this aspect of conservation biology but none that I have seen give credit to the person who drew attention to the problem nearly 70 years ago.

Under the provocative title, Can wild animals be kept in captivity?, Helen Spurway questioned not whether wild animals can be kept in captivity from the technological point of view but whether they can be maintained wild genetically. The emphasis was thus on the word ‘wild’. She wrote:

I believe it to be impossible to breed genuine wild animal under artificial conditions as to stand in a bucket of water and pick oneself up.

She argued it was inevitable that artificial selection occurs at all stages of keeping wild animals in captivity and that everybody doing so was involved in a process of domestication:

We, who keep animals, either as amateur naturalists, curators of zoological gardens, or academic biologists, cannot help taking part in some domestications.

In her admittedly rambling article (sadly, a model of organisation compared with ones she wrote on her studies of newts), Helen Spurway, considered the genetic and environmental factors that take place in captive populations which in the end produce animals different from those in the wild.

In a nutshell, artificial selection can—and did—occur at just about every stage. Captured individuals may have been may weakest or slowest in a population. The first, or only, individuals to breed in captivity would have led to selection of those least affected by stress to pass on their genes. I could continue in the same vein but the message is clear.

Helen Spurway also pointed out that even the first breeding in captivity involve inbreeding (think Golden Hamster, with only one mother and litter forming the captive/domesticated population for decades) or a degree of outbreeding never encountered in the wild. Therefore, she argued, there is an inevitable domestication of wild animals in captivity with succeeding generations and we end up with a phenotype adapted to life in captivity rather than life in the wild.

Helen Spurway (1915-1978) was a geneticist, then working at University College London. She is best remembered as the second wife of J.B.S. Haldane who shared his marxist beliefs and admiration for Joseph Stalin. They left Britain to work in India in 1956. At the time she wrote the article she was working on genetic differences between populations of European newts and was keeping a number in captivity for breeding experiments. I have written a little about that work here.

Helen Spurway and JBS Haldane in Calcutta

But how did I get to know about Spurway’s article? In 1959, starting ‘A’ level zoology and botany, we were introduced to the Biology Library at school (where a number of us hung out for much of the day in the company of museum specimens and a human skull. The senior biology master James J Key looked towards a small pile of paperbacks and suggested we work our way through them. They were old issues of Penguin New Biology and the first one I picked up contained the article by Helen Spurway.

Penguin’s series, New Biology, was published from 1945 until 1960 in 31 volumes. It was aimed at VIth form pupils and first-year undergraduates. The ‘new’ before ‘biology’ indicated several trends, not simply the promotion of then new areas of discovery, like cell biology, over traditional descriptive pursuits such as comparative anatomy. The great, and supposedly new, emphasis was on the use of biology in human affairs. The ‘new’ in this instance represented the views of the large number of marxist and communist biologists in the British university system who were arguing that progress could only come be made by having a planned economy with planned and centrally-controlled science as part of that process. I cannot help but point out that the holders of such beliefs were horrified if anybody tried to tell them what research they should be doing. Some scientists are more equal than others.

The editors who founded and ran Penguin’s New Biology were the husband and wife team, Michael Abercrombie FRS (1912-1979), the famous cell biologist and experimental embryologist, and Minnie Louie Johnson (1909-1984). 

The history of Penguin’s New Biology is told by Sir Peter Medawar in his biographical memoir on Abercrombie for the Royal Society, which, incidentally, contains acidic observations on some of the academic zoologists of the day:

It was an important event for the Abercrombies when Lancelot Hogben succeeded Munro Fox as the Mason Professor of Zoology at Birmingham and appointed Michael [Abercrombie] Lecturer in Zoology. Hogben lived with the socio­logist Professor Sargant Florence in the top floor of whose house the Aber­crombies had a flat. Hogben and the Abercrombies became very thick and it was Hogben, a great popular educationalist (cp. Mathematics for the Million) who turned the Abercrombies’ thoughts to one of the most important enter­prises of their lives… 

Hogben arranged an introduction to Allen Lane of Penguin Books and the Abercrombies undertook to produce a series of volumes to be called New Biology, each one of which would contain a number of authoritative essays at a pretty high academic level—sixth form and university first year. Lane paid £75 for the first volume, a sum which the Abercrombies shared out among the contributors, characteristically leaving themselves out. The first volume was a great success and sold something like 100,000 copies—a great success by scholarly standards—but as the series continued to a total of 31 volumes the sales dwindled to 20 000. Eventually, then, the verdict of the market place brought the series to an end… 

New Biology had a profoundly stimulating effect upon sixth formers and first year undergraduates and probably played an important part in speeding up the recruitment into biology that caused it to take up its present position as the most deeply absorbing and rapidly moving of all the sciences today.

New Scientist on 31 March 1960 in covering the demise of New Biology concluded:

New Biology has died because it could not make a living. There is something disturbingly wrong with a culture that could allow this to happen.

There was also this cartoon:

Nowadays, Penguin’s New Biology has been largely forgotten, copies in university and school libraries thrown out along with other key volumes in the battle for shelf space. As well as crackingly good articles its pages contained some notable spats between famous savants of the day and started some controversies that ran through biology and its history for decades.

Medawar PB. 1980. Michael Abercrombie 14 August 1912—28 May 1979. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 26, 1-15

Spurway H. 1952. Can wild animals be kept in captivity? New Biology 13 (edited by M Abercrobie and ML Johnson), 11-30. London: Penguin

Spurway H. 1953. Genetics of specific and subspecific differences in European newts. Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology 7, 200-237

Where the Lion Trod. C.H. Keeling. Zoo history - a new re-publication of the 1984 book, edited by John Adams for the Bartlett Society

My old friend, Clinton Keeling (1932-2007), after a series of misfortunes, some of which it has to be said, were of his own making, reinvented himself as a historian of British zoos*. Beginning in 1984 he produced a series of booklets over the next 19 years with particular attention to a number to zoos that had long been closed. There were two problems why these booklets remain relatively unknown. The first was that they were self-published as typewritten cyclostyled sheets and so never reached conventional publishing and retailing channels. The second was that their content was not obvious from the title (e.g. Where the Leopard Lazed, Where the Macaw Preened, Where the Penguin Plunged). The booklets were known to very few people and the numbers sold must have been very small. Those surviving in circulation must also have dwindled. I suspect the few that I had in the 1980s got bundled with similarly-bound reports and ended in that open-ended receptacle in my office that was sooner or (rarely) later the final resting place of A4-sized documents received from government departments.

The Bartlett Society, which Clin founded in 1984 for zoo history enthusiasts, has made the brave decision to republish the first of Clin’s books, Where the Lion Trod, but this time as hardback. Brave because the information it contains is dated, not surprisingly since sources of information were far harder to access in the 1980s, and brave because it is difficult to predict whether such a venture would be other than a financial drain.

Zoo histories come as two sorts. The first sort which look outwards are produced by social historians and tell you all about the milieu in which the zoo operated, its supposed social significance and why everything is all down to colonialism. The second tell you a lot about the animals kept, the people who set them up and something about the layout and architecture. Clin’s books fall firmly into the latter category; the first sort would have had him foaming at the mouth. His prejudices, both about how animals were kept and should be kept, and about the world in general, shine through so that those who never spent time in his company will get some idea of his diatribes against those who ran zoos in Britain, his loathing of popular culture and his hatred of ‘The Great British Public”.

Clin’s research and musings covered twenty extinct collections/zoos dating from the 13th century (the menagerie in the Tower of London) until 1959 (the date of closure of Maidstone Zoo). Various chapters consider, for example, the long-gone zoos in Liverpool, Manchester before Belle Vue, Edinburgh before the present Edinburgh Zoo, Hull (where a pub still recalls the zoo that closed in 1862), Southport, Cardiff, Halifax, Oxford, Sheringham and Southend.

The original format has been followed so that this hardback reprint bears a striking resemblance to the original typed version. I feel that was an error since I had the feeling of reading a dissertation for a degree rather than a published book. The editor has also added a few notes of explanation or correction as well as a list of known species kept at each establishment; the latter I finds adds little.

I must end with this paragraph on Maidstone Zoo (1934-1959) and its owner, the brewer Sir Garrard Tyrwhitt-Drake (1881-1964):

Sir Garrard was nothing if not a character. When I met him I almost did a double-take in amazement, so astonishing was his likeness to Charlie Chaplin. He invited me into the manor, gave me a glass of beer and after talking to me for a time said ”Hmmm, you know a bit about animals”, which I took to be praised indeed. Then suddenly he said “Well I must ask you to go now Mr Keeling—I want my lunch!” And that was that.

You can buy the book from the Bartlett Society here.

*Those who knew Clin Keeling will realise I risk his posthumous wrath. He never called a zoo a zoo, always a ‘zoological gardens’. I also visit the bot in Hong Kong and also, on occasion, the bot in Edinburgh and the bot at Kew.