The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Thanksgiving, his body was immediately sent to the San Diego Zoo. Houck
raced to the institute to deal with it. “This is our last chance,” she
remembers thinking. “This is the dodo.” Houck succeeded in culturing
some of the cells from the bird’s eye, and the results of that effort now
make up the contents of the vials. She doesn’t want the cells to get
damaged, so after about a minute she slides the vials back in the box and
returns them to the tank.
The windowless room where the poouli cells are kept alive—sort of— is called the Frozen Zoo. The name is trademarked, and if other institutions try to use it, they are advised they are breaking the law. The room holds half a dozen tanks just like the one Houck opened, and stored inside of them, in frigid clouds of nitrogen, are cell lines representing nearly a thousand species. (Really this is just half the “zoo”; the other half consists of tanks at a different facility whose location is pointedly kept secret. Each cell line is split between the two facilities, in case the power goes out at one of them.) The Frozen Zoo maintains the world’s largest collection of species on ice, but an increasing number of other institutions are also assembling chilled menageries; the Cincinnati Zoo, for example, runs what it calls the CryoBioBank and England’s University of Nottingham operates the Frozen Ark. For now, almost all of the species in deep freeze in San Diego still have flesh-and-blood members. But as more and more plants and animals go the way of the poouli, this is likely to change. While Houck is busy
resealing the tank, I think of the hundreds of bat corpses collected from
the floor of Aeolus Cave that were shipped to the Cryo Collection of the
American Museum of Natural History. I try to calculate how many little
plastic vials and vats of liquid nitrogen would be required to store cultures
of all of the frogs threatened by chytrid and the corals threatened by
acidification and the pachyderms threatened by poaching, and the
multitudinous species threatened by warming and invasives and
fragmentation, and soon I give up; there are too many numbers to keep in
my head.