In a California laboratory, four women do the painstaking work of preserving cells amid a growing extinction crisis
In a basement laboratory abutting a 730-hectare wildlife park in San Diego, California, Marlys Houck looks up to see a uniformed man holding a blue insulated lunch bag filled with small pieces of eyes, trachea, feet and feathers.
“Ah,” she says, softly. “Here are today’s samples.”
The bag contains small bits of soft tissue from animals who have died of natural causes at the zoo. Today’s samples include a leaf frog and a starling.
The man holding the bag is James Boggeln, a volunteer with the zoo, who hands it to Houck, the curator of this laboratory, known as the “Frozen Zoo”. She and her team will start turning these bits of tissue into a bank of research and conservation for the future. They will put the tissue into flasks where enzymes digest them, then
