San Antonio Zoo

Project Selva provides indigenous communities of the Peruvian Amazon with a scalable revenue stream generated through the sale of handmade crafts. These crafts do not involve animal parts, timber harvest, or oil/mineral extraction, thereby preserving ancestral lands, primary rainforests, and protecting the wildlife biodiversity of the region. This project is supported by various partners and through the sale of gyotaku fish prints (found here) created by trained Peruvian artists from Iquitos.”

The Mexican blindcat (Prietella phreatophila) is a rare subterranean catfish known from twelve sites in Coahuila, Mexico. Members of our team recently documented a population in Val Verde County, Texas, the first confirmed occurrence of this species in the United States.

The iconic Texas Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum) is the state reptile of Texas and was once abundant across the western two-thirds of the state. Since the late 1960s, horned lizard populations have declined or disappeared in many areas due to a variety of factors, including deterioration, fragmentation, and loss of habitat; non-native invasive species such as exotic grasses and red imported fire ants; and pesticide use. Many Texans have fond memories of the Texas Horned Lizard (aka “horny toad”) and wish for its return to its former abundance.

The Texas Horned Lizard Reintroduction Project at Center for Conservation and Research (CCR) at San Antonio Zoo seeks to restore the Texas Horned Lizard population by working with private landowners to introduce zoo hatched lizards in areas where it has disappeared in recent decades.