Beyond government, zoology in the wild

What happens to science when governments change course? Dan Ashe has seen both sides of that question. After spending 22 years with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—including six years as its Director—he now serves as president and CEO of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which accredits many of North America's leading zoos and aquariums. Newsjunkie staff reporter Morgan Kriesel spoke with Ashe about the loss of scientific expertise within the federal government, the role nonprofit institutions can play during periods of political upheaval, and why voluntary standards can exceed government regulation.

“Almost every day, I hear about someone else I worked with for years leaving the Fish and Wildlife Service… the end result is a tremendous loss of institutional knowledge.”

You spent 22 years with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before becoming president of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). In your nominee [for Director of the Service] statement, you said you were proud to help usher in "a renaissance of science and professionalism" within the agency.

Obviously, the Fish and Wildlife Service has been impacted by the recent federal cuts. According to the Defenders of Wildlife, it's lost “at least 18% of its staff nationwide, including more than 500 biologists working on the ground.”

What's it like to watch the progress that you were a part of be [unraveled] like that?

Well, it's difficult, because I'm very attached to the people. Almost every day, I hear about someone else I worked with for years leaving the Fish and Wildlife Service. Most of them have either been able to retire because they're eligible, or they've been offered the opportunity to retire through this deferred resignation program. But the end result is a tremendous loss of institutional knowledge.

Within any institution—US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Zoo Atlanta—they all depend upon a progression of knowledge within the organization. So, yeah, it's difficult. And I empathize with the current director and my colleagues who are having to manage that.

Science has always been an integral part of the work. And great work like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. It's not just important for the health of wildlife and wildlife populations, but it has always been very important for the health of people, and the prospering of communities throughout the world.

The science isn't the icing on the cake—it's the cake.

Yeah, exactly.

You left the Fish and Wildlife Service right as Trump was taking office the first time. Was that part of why you left?

Well, so I was a career professional in the US Fish and Wildlife Service for 16 of those 22 years. And then President Obama nominated me to be the director, which is a political position. So I retained my career status, I could have stayed in the organization, but—kind of weird, right?

Why was it weird?

Well, if you were director… and then you're gonna be something else? It was a good time to leave.

The way it works is, at the end of every administration, they ask all of the political appointees to submit their resignations. They send you a form letter, that's the traditional practice. So at the end of the Biden administration, all of his political appointees had to do the same thing.

I didn't leave because of any disagreement in particular with President Trump, but he wasn't gonna nominate me to be Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. So it was a good point to leave, and I had a great opportunity at AZA.

So you left government for the nonprofit world. What was that transition like, and what drew you to the AZA and to nonprofit work?

What drew me to AZA was the work that they do, and their commitment to wildlife, and wild places, and providing exceptional care of animals.

Throughout my career—both in the Fish and Wildlife Service and before that in the US House of Representatives—I had worked extensively with AZA member zoos and aquariums on endangered species conservation and marine mammal protection. Everybody knows everybody, it’s a very close-knit community of people.

[AZA is] very similar, in a way, to the Fish and Wildlife Service—it’s a very similar professional and personal culture. They obviously love animals. So it was a very good transition for me.

“Our members care very much about things like jellyfish, and banana slugs, and crabs, and iguanas... But the Animal Welfare Act does not cover them.”

Every zoo has to have a USDA license, right?

If they have mammals or birds, they have to have a USDA Class C license. So for instance, if you were an aquarium and all you had was fish and reptiles, you don't need a USDA license. But if you're an aquarium like the National Aquarium in Baltimore—they have the Amazon Forest, they have birds, they have dolphins, so they have a USDA license. But the Animal Welfare Act does not cover reptiles, or fish, or invertebrates.

They're tough, they can take it?

I guess, yeah.

Our members care very much about things like jellyfish, and banana slugs, and crabs, and iguanas, and things like that. But the Animal Welfare Act does not cover them.

Yeah, that's interesting. I'm curious about that gap between nonprofits like the AZA and government regulation systems—like, why would you need accreditation, or organizations like the AZA to step in and say, "The standards need to be higher?” Where does that come from?

I think it comes from a desire to be the best in your field. You don't have to belong to the National Baseball League to be the best baseball team, right? But that represents the pinnacle of performance.

I think what drives people to seek AZA accreditation is a passion for excellence. They want to be the best in their profession. And they want to be associated with the best in the profession, being a part of that community affords them the opportunity for professional development, to continue improving and be challenged to be better. And so they look to AZA to reflect that standard and uphold that standard.

It's completely voluntary. There's no law that requires people to be AZA accredited. It's entirely just dedication to excellence.

That makes sense. As I've been interviewing experts for this project, something that's really admirable to me is that scientists—especially ex-federal scientists, who were completely cut off from the work that they dedicated their lives to—they just wanna get back to the work, to contributing to their field. I think that’s a really cool part of the scientific community. It makes total sense that they would want a higher standard than the bare minimum requirements.

And I mean, the USDA licensing process is valuable. And the people who work at USDA are like me, they're federal employees dedicated to the proposition of animal care and welfare. But the USDA Animal Care, which does the licensing process—I don't know the exact numbers today, but I think they have fewer than 200 inspectors, and zoos and aquariums are a small piece of their business. They have to inspect dog breeding operations and horse breeding operations, they cover a huge gamut. They have about 200 inspectors that have to do all of that.

At AZA, we have a field of nearly 300 inspectors covering our 254 accredited members. So, if we were going to a facility like the National Zoo here in Washington, DC to do their accreditation inspection, it would probably be five inspectors. They would probably spend four to five days poring through the facility. National Zoo would probably spend the better part of a year developing the inspection report. Then the zoo has to appear at an accreditation hearing, and they have to address concerns that the inspection report may have arisen.

It's a process that our members often describe (with affection!) as “exhaustive.” But it's much more than USDA can do with the kind of limited workforce and time that they have available to them.

Something I found interesting about AZA is that, according to your website, “accredited zoos and aquariums… are expected to conduct or facilitate research.” Is [research] required for accreditation, or just an expectation?

It's required. They have to show us they have a program of research that they intend to conduct.

Of course, animal care and welfare is the centerpiece of accreditation, but they have to have an education program. They have to have a research program. They have to have a conservation program. We look at their finances because we wanna make sure that they are not just creditable today, but they're gonna be able to maintain that level of performance over time. We look at the whole picture of the organization.

And they all do significant scientific research. Like Lincoln Park Zoo, they have done groundbreaking research on the use of animals in display, and the messages it can send to the public. So I see somebody holding a small primate, like a bush baby or something, and what message does that send to the public? Like, "Oh, that looks like a great pet. I would love to have one of those. Hey, where can I buy one?" So they've done just groundbreaking research that's changed the way we display animals and present them to the public. And that [research is] continuing today.

“I can't tell you that I've seen any visible impact on science in our community, and that probably reflects the business model.”

It's really encouraging to see these nonprofit parallel institutions step in when political changes affect the regulatory government system like this. That's something I'm really interested in with this project: What kind of supports, safety nets, do we have for science? Can they be built up during this period of turmoil so that, no matter what happens with government, we have something?

I can't tell you that I've seen any visible impact on science in our community, and that probably reflects the business model.

I mean, the zoo and aquarium business model is a very robust business model. They don't rely on grants for operational support. And I haven't heard or seen any direct evidence that the scientific work that our members are doing has been affected or disadvantaged. That doesn't mean that's not happening, but that means I haven't seen it in our community.

For instance, The Sarasota Dolphin Project—Mote Marine Lab and the Brookfield Zoo have worked together (probably since the 1970s) to study the wild dolphin population in Sarasota Bay, and I certainly haven't heard of any disruption in that project.

And our work to develop a vaccine for the EEHV virus in elephants. I'll have to look it up so you can know what that term means.

Yeah, that’s not one I know off the top of my head.

Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpes Virus.

EEHV is a virus that affects young elephants, and the mortality rate is extremely high. It affects wild elephants, but more so captive elephants. So finding a cure for a vaccine for EEHV has been a high priority for our members for well over a decade. But about a decade ago, Houston Zoo and Baylor University School of Medicine began working together in a dedicated fashion to develop an EEHV vaccine, which they have done for Asian elephants (there's only about 20,000 wild Asian elephants left in the world so every one counts). And now they're working on a vaccine for EEHV in African elephants.

That research has continued. In fact, I heard last week from Houston Zoo that they had gotten a $1 million donation to support the EEHV work for African elephants. Those are [just] two examples of projects that are continuing. Like I said, I have not heard from our members about any kind of significant scientific work that has been interrupted.

I'm sure that's not true for other nonprofits, and nonprofits that rely on grants for operational support are certainly more vulnerable to short-term disruption.

That's interesting, because it seems like museums have been hit quite hard. But maybe it's not accurate to lump zoos and museums together.

I mean, we consider ourselves part of the larger museum community. We collaborate all the time with the Association of Science and Technology Centers, with the Alliance of American Museums, with the Association of Children's Museums, the Botanical Gardens Association. So we have much in common with them.

I'm not as familiar with their business models,

but the AZA business model is built on a due structure. So when our members are doing well, we do well.

AZA has received government grants in the past, and we have a couple currently. And we've had no issues with them. Early on in this administration, the IMLS (Institute for Museum and Library Services) grants were suspended, and we joined a lawsuit challenging those disruptions. The lawsuit was successful. The grants have been reinstituted. And IMLS grants are—they're significant for our membership, but certainly less significant than for libraries, and for traditional museums.

Do you know if the funds from the IMLS grants have actually been re-released, if people have the money again?

As far as I know, they have. I haven't heard to the contrary, and our members are usually pretty vocal if something like that is happening.

“…[we] create this thing we call ‘experience.’”

What do you think separates your members' business models from museums’? Because, I think even museum attendance has been dipping over the past few years. Is there a different relationship to the public that zoos have, maybe? Or, what do you think that difference could be attributed to?

I imagine people write PhDs about what that might be attributable to, but I think…

We have animals, right?

My wife is a business person, and she always says "My God, I'm gonna come back to be you [in the next life], because you represent animals." She always says, "I represent the guy on the Monopoly board that has a monocle in his eye."

I think that people love animals, and we display them responsibly and in ways that create this thing we call “experience.” And it's not a static exhibit, it changes every day, probably several times a day.

People like Sylvia Earle, who have seen the deepest parts of the world's ocean—I heard her talk one time about watching an aquarist working with a sea pen (a little eel-like thing that lives in the sand). She was talking about this aquarist, and how meticulous and careful she was in caring for this sea pen. So I think even the people that have had the best of experiences can be amazed at what they see at a zoo or aquarium.

Which is not to say that the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History isn't an amazing and engaging place. But I just think our members have something special, and they're the best in the world at doing it.

And we all suffered through the pandemic (and got exceptional support from the government). But our members kinda came back gangbusters after the pandemic. I mean, when people felt safe getting back out into public spaces, they came back gangbusters. And for most of our members, 2023 and 2024 were record years. Again, it's a robust business model. And I suspect animals are certainly the key to that.

That's why this notion of accreditation is important, because you have a social contract with the public. If they don't think the animals are being well cared for, and are thriving, then they're not gonna come.