Bristol Zoological Society has been working with local partners based in the Philippines for many years. One of these partnerships, which has been running since 2013, is with Silliman University (SU) based in Dumaguete on Negros Island.

SU runs two breeding centres under the umbrella name CENTROP (Centre for Tropical Studies); one in the city centre called Daro and one more remote location a few kilometres away called Palinpinon.

The goal of these breeding centres is to maintain insurance populations of three threatened endemic species. These are the Visayan warty pig, the Philippine spotted deer and the Negros bleeding-heart dove. Across the two sites, CENTROP holds a substantial proportion of the world’s captive populations of these three species, and Head Keeper Lou Jean Cerial was the first in the world to achieve breeding success with Negros bleeding-heart doves, back in early 2000s. The eventual goal of CENTROP is to identify possible locations the animals can be released to bolster wild populations, although this is a long way off due to the threats of poaching and habitat degradation.

Negros bleeding-heart dove at Talarak's Negros Forest Park, our other ex situ partner in the Philippines. Photo credit: Dylan McKenzie.

Since 2022, my role has been to offer support and guidance to the CENTROP team to assist with elevating the husbandry and welfare of the animals under their care. Together, we have created species-specific diets that ensure good health and promote wild foraging behaviours. We have also carried out habitat refurbishments to make the environments more enriching, including the construction of amazing visual barriers to offer the animals the chance to rest out of sight of other animals and provide a feeling of safety. Vitally, we also assisted them in improving biosecurity measures to reduce the risk of African swine fever getting into the centres. The team have been coming up with creative ways to provide novel enrichment opportunities, including whole coconuts, vegetables suspended above the ground and a mealworm breeding facility to facilitate scatter feeds in the leaf litter.

SU students have been busy carrying out body condition checks on the pigs and deer, as well as behavioural observation studies, which have been yielding interesting information about group dynamics and habitat use.

We’re also currently hard at work trying to digitise CENTROP’s records, which historically had been written on scraps of paper or stored in the heads of the keepers! We are particularly interested in digitising the pedigree information so that when the time comes, we can select which animals to release based on robust data such as the genetic diversity of the candidates.

We have provided two tablets to CENTROP, one for each site, so keepers can record their daily checks directly onto the tablet. Ricardo Lemos de Figueiredo, Philipppines Conservation Project Manager, will shortly be workshopping with the team to show them how to use ZooMonitor software, to enable systematic behavioural monitoring and facilitate behaviour and welfare assessments. 

Finally, one of our goals in this partnership is to optimise population management and enable a collaborative approach between CENTROP and the other breeding facilities on Negros and Panay islands. Our plans include getting CENTROP into Species360's ZIMS (Zoological Information Management System), so they can add all their animals and records to the global database. This will be invaluable in informing long-term management plans for the captive populations, facilitating breeding programmes, enhancing genetic diversity and fostering conservation and research collaborations.

It is wonderful to collaborate with the CENTROP team as they are working hard to ensure their animals are happy and healthy, despite resources being tight.

Learn more about out Philippines conservation project team here.