Brochures with customer information usually offer dry reading. This is certainly the case for the various booklets devoted to the International Species Information System (ISIS), a computerised data system set up in 1974 to improve the management of zoo collections. Through circulating booklets, ISIS spokespersons addressed zoo directors around the world to become members and add their animal data to the system. In order to enliven the otherwise monotonous facts and figures, the cover of a 1984 brochure shows a cartoon (Figure 1). It depicts one of the classic themes of the cartoon genre: an animal-filled Noah’s ark. The tagline has Noah say: ‘Of course, I missed the unicorns. How can I keep track of everybody without a damned computer?’
Figure 1. Noah longing for a computer. (‘International Species Information System’, August 1984, KMDA, B1.5.3.8, ISIS 1054#443, Felixarchief Antwerpen).
The cartoon nicely captures the promissory discourse of ISIS’s leading figures. It clearly speaks to the ambition of zoo managers to rebrand their institutions as ‘Noah’s arks’—institutions engaged in saving endangered species through captive breeding. It also speaks to long-standing concerns about maintaining healthy populations of globally scattered and often highly inbred animals. Don Bridgwater, Minnesota Zoo director and ISIS associate, explicitly highlighted both in a letter to a fellow director in 1976. He wrote: ‘In order to meet … [the] pressing problems, it is necessary to develop policies to manage gene pools over multiple generations and to collect data and share it among zoos throughout the world. This is basically what ISIS was designed to do and is accomplishing.’Footnote 1 Among the ‘pressing problems’ Bridgwater referred to were the tightening of laws governing the trade in zoo animals and what he saw as a growing anti-zoo sentiment. He believed that an exchange of computerised information could offer an answer. By allowing an organised, objectified, and global exchange of animal bodies (and the genes these bodies contained), it offered zoos a possibility to rebrand themselves as scientifically run conservation institutions. In the presentation of its developers, ISIS appeared as a ground-breaking instrument for the categorisation, datafication, and globalisation of captive ‘exotic’ animals, for the standardisation and rationalisation of knowledge about those animals, and for the collaboration between institutions that held them.
The promises raised by men such as Bridgwater managed to capture the imagination for a long time. In 2016, ISIS’s name was changed to Species360 (as the original acronym became associated with the terrorist organisation Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), but the original ambitions and promissory discourse surrounding the information system have remained largely unaltered until today. Currently, Species360 serves over 1,300 zoos in 102 countries across five continents. As such, it has become the single most important information system for ex situ conservation—the protection of endangered wildlife outside its natural habitat. Over the past decades, ISIS has indeed shaped the global dimensions of captive breeding. Gradually connecting an expanding network of zoological institutions across the globe, ISIS and later Species360 significantly contributed to the idea of a ‘global zoo’ in which endangered animals are exchanged to the benefit of their long-term survival in captivity.Footnote 2
This article studies the genesis of ISIS to understand the ideas and practices of ‘global’ ex situ conservation while still in the making. Generating images of universal science, free-floating information, and frictionless flows of animals, the proponents of ISIS envisioned their project as an almost self-evident technological fix for zoological institutions struggling to become Noah’s arks. Yet, making ISIS work proved anything but straightforward, and, to this day, it has not fully realised its original ambitions. This can only be comprehended, this article argues, by acknowledging that the functioning of border-crossing infrastructures requires continuous human work that is local, political, and embodied. We will show how this is evident in, firstly, the design of the system and its early adaptations to fit particular legal and scientific contexts; secondly, in the negotiations involved in extending the system’s network; and, finally, in the practical routines that kept it together. Only by considering these various instances of work, can we fully grasp the true power of global ex situ conservation, and, importantly, its limitations.
As such, this study of ISIS intersects with several scholarly traditions. The first concerns the historiography of global infrastructures. The rise of ISIS indeed fits into the much wider emergence of so-called ‘infrastructural globalism’, which, in the words of historian Paul Edwards, was characterised by ‘projects for permanent, unified, world-scale institutional-technological complexes that generate globalist information … by design’.Footnote 3 The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and particularly the post-Second World War period, saw a proliferation of such projects, concerning fields as widely divergent as meteorology, engineering and economics, oceanography and state intelligence.Footnote 4 Historians have already shown that human-wildlife relations did not escape the grip of this infrastructural globalism. They have notably indicated how cross-border institutions and data technologies have historically shaped the study, monitoring and conservation of free-ranging animals ‘in the wild’.Footnote 5 This article extends this line of scholarship to the history of ex situ conservation, and explores the ways in which infrastructural globalism has shaped its practices.
The second scholarly tradition this article engages with evidently concerns the emerging literature on datafication and conservation. In her work, geographer Irus Braverman has indeed discussed ISIS as one of the instruments that is central to present-day zoos’ ‘dataveillance’, which she describes as ‘the global computerized management of animal populations’.Footnote 6 Braverman’s analysis, which indicates how this management leads to ‘collective reproductive control’, resonates with a broader interest among geographers and anthropologists in datafication (and its biopolitical dimension) within the context of contemporary conservation practices.Footnote 7 To date, however, the history of datafication practices in the context of the zoo has been studied to a far lesser degree.Footnote 8 As a result, we know little of the context in which ISIS developed, and the historical ways through which it influenced the management of captive animals throughout the world.Footnote 9
This is probably no coincidence. As information scholars Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have indicated, historical narratives traditionally background information infrastructures. In their words, such infrastructures consist of ‘technologies and arrangements that, by design and by habit, tend to fade into the woodwork’. Only by a methodology of ‘infrastructural inversion’ that specifically foregrounds these technologies and arrangements, can we come to understand how information infrastructures work. Taking this approach, Bowker and Star state, ‘means recognizing the depths of interdependence of technical networks and standards, on the one hand, and the real work of politics and knowledge production on the other’.Footnote 10 This means attending to the ways infrastructures are simultaneously political and material. Recently, scholars working in line with Bowker and Star have added specific insights into the development of computerised and digital information systems, stressing how—despite an aura of virtuality and placelessness—such systems can only function through physical realities and localised practices.Footnote 11 These dimensions, we argue, are indeed particularly relevant for the functioning of ISIS.
Laying bare the woodwork of ISIS serves a wider argument. Focusing on the development and introduction of ISIS during its first decade, this article seeks to re-examine the global history of captive animal conservation in several steps. First, it investigates how the local socio-technical environment of the Minneapolis computing district influenced ISIS’s early history. Second, it highlights how national dynamics in the United States shifted ISIS’s direction and fuelled its momentum. In response to 1970s’ legislation restricting the trade and transport of exotic animals, American zoo managers envisioned a science-based data system that could ensure the survival of their institutions by refocusing them on global endangered species breeding. They saw ISIS as a tool to facilitate the transition from individual zoos sourcing animals from the wild to a cross-border, scientifically managed ‘global zoo’ operating as a closed circuit. However, making the data system functional—especially at a global level—was a complex and labour-intensive task. The final part of the article analyses the painstaking process of negotiating ISIS’s focus and modalities, of expanding its network beyond its context of origin, and of engaging large user groups in its practical routines. Understanding these inner workings of ISIS’s infrastructure is essential to explaining why the envisioned transition to a ‘global zoo’ was ultimately slow, contested, and incomplete. More broadly, I argue, it is critical for understanding the global history of ex situ conservation—its shape, scope, and reach—in the period after 1970.
Systems across contexts
From its inception, ISIS explicitly carried ‘international’ in its name. This gestures to the fact that its designers always held an ambition to connect zoological institutions across national borders, if possible globally.Footnote 12 Yet, it is also evident that ISIS was developed from a clearly localised centre: Minneapolis, Minnesota. This location might be surprising, as, in the 1970s, Minneapolis was a rather peripheral place in the zoo world. In this period, old and prestigious zoological gardens, such as those of London, Paris, and Zurich in Europe, and New York, Washington, and San Diego in the United States, still served as the most important global models of zoo management. Minneapolis did not have a zoo of such stature. When ISIS launched in 1974, Minnesota Zoological Garden was still under construction—set to open its doors to the public only four years later.Footnote 13 Arguably, this brought some advantages as the embryonic zoo could offer the initiators of ISIS a flexible testing ground for their ideas.Footnote 14 Yet, the Minnesota Zoo certainly did not provide a ready-made network or reputation in wider zoo circles. Minneapolis’s advantages lay elsewhere. In order to understand this, it is important to look at the larger institutional ecosystem on which ISIS drew.
Importantly, Minneapolis was one of the three major centres of 1970s’ American computing (alongside California’s Silicon Valley and Massachusetts’ Route 128). Its computing industry had strongly benefitted from military support during the Second World War. After 1945, the presence of a research university combined with backing from local and state governments, as well as the real estate, finance, and banking world led to what Thomas J. Misa has described as the first computing-centred industrial district in the world.Footnote 15 The advent of computers in Minnesota’s business world in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with an increased focus on information flows within organisations and attempts to create so-called ‘totally integrated management information systems’. Such ambitions befitted a corporate world that, in the words of computer historian Thomas Haigh, was ‘self-consciously remaking itself around science, high technology, staff experts, and systems’.Footnote 16 All these elements clearly echoed in ISIS’s design.
More important still than developments in the corporate sphere were those in state-sponsored medicine. It is, after all, in this context that we have to situate ISIS’s main architect: Ulysses Seal. Holding an MA in Psychology and a PhD in biochemistry, Seal worked from 1959 onward at the Veteran’s Administration Medical Center in Minneapolis, where his research concerned the endocrinological dimensions of prostate cancer.Footnote 17 In the margins of this endocrinological work, he developed an interest in comparative biochemistry, studying, for instance, the differences in blood values across species. During this research, which brought him into contact with zoos, Seal found that baseline data for most exotic species remained unknown, and he decided to work towards a computerised database.Footnote 18 This was hardly a new idea in a hospital context, as, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, most US hospitals had computerised their patient records.Footnote 19 Crossing the species border, Seal just extended the infrastructure to non-human animals in the hope of establishing what he called ‘physiological norms’. To this end, Seal and his graduate student, Dale G. Makey, developed the so-called SEAMAK ZOOGAD system, a database that, in their own words, was to serve ‘zoological data storage, retrieval and analysis’. In this same period, they started collaborating with the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians (AAZV) with which they shared the goal to improve individual animal health.Footnote 20
Yet, initial results proved to be disappointing. Seal soon realised that many zoos did not have individual record systems for their animals, which implied he could not tie blood samples to specimens.Footnote 21 Hence, he decided to create such records, and, once again, he could draw on existing systems of human governance. After all, the United States government had used punch-cards and Hollerith tabulators to inventory its resident population since as early as 1890.Footnote 22 In the 1970s, Seal and Makey worked towards a largely similar system for the census and identification of zoo animals that—like Hollerith’s old technology—still involved the filling in of data forms and sending them to a central office to keypunch them on 80-column cards.Footnote 23 From a technical perspective, a zoo population was not all that different from that of a state.
The context in which ISIS came into existence is thus a multi-layered one. There was, in general, a post-war infatuation with ‘systems’ in both corporate and government circles. And, more specifically, there were US experiences with punch-card technologies in the record keeping of patients by hospitals and of human populations by government administrations. These traditions translated into Seal’s ambitions to set up a ‘physiological norm program’ and a zoo animal census, respectively. Yet, by the autumn of 1973, when Seal approached the Minnesota Zoo to act as the location for developing a computer program, he had already added a third dimension: an inventory that would specifically serve the breeding of endangered species.Footnote 24 This ambition, which would soon overshadow the other two, gained traction because of yet another specific context. It is to this context—which concerns the realm of legal and moral frameworks—that we turn now.
Legislation and science: Constructing self-sustaining populations
Around 1970, the legislative context in which US zoos operated changed rapidly and fundamentally—especially regarding endangered animals. Under pressure from both humane societies and conservation organisations, the United States administration passed several (increasingly stringent) Endangered Species Acts (1966–73) and ratified the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES, 1973).Footnote 25 Zoo managers were not amused. According to some, the legislative limitations on the trade and transport of endangered and threatened animals even meant that zoos were ‘being legislated out of business’.Footnote 26 New regulations largely cut off zoological gardens from trade in wild-caught animals and strongly complicated the exchange of animals between zoos. Amid perceived anti-zoo sentiments, zoological gardens tried to take back the initiative.Footnote 27
The American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums (AAZPA)—the non-profit organisation speaking on behalf of a large number of American zoos—took a leading role in attempts to both change public perception and amend legislation. In outward communication, AAZPA leaders tried to rebrand zoos from places of public spectacle into institutions that championed conservation through captive breeding. Simultaneously, the association endorsed the newly founded Zoological Action Committee Inc. (also called ZooAct), which lobbied Congress not to give in to ‘the latest humaniac boondoggle’.Footnote 28 In 1975, several AAZPA-affiliated zoo representatives argued in hearings for the House of Representatives that the Endangered Species Act was actually counterproductive and would render the breeding of endangered species impossible. Among the zoo representatives who took the stand was Ulysses Seal. His appearance at the House of Representatives fit within a wider strategy to simultaneously rethink zoo practice and federal legislation. In this strategy, ISIS would play an important role.Footnote 29
Central to Seal’s rethinking exercise was one particular notion: ‘captive self-sustaining populations’ (CSSPs). Such CSSPs were defined as populations held in captivity, independent from influx from the wild, that can be maintained over extended periods without inbreeding. ISIS, Seal believed, offered a system to render such CSSPs from an abstraction into something concrete. It provided a system to calculate the minimum number of individuals needed for populations to be self-sustaining, and to organise exchanges between zoos to avoid inbreeding as much as possible.Footnote 30 By offering evidence through ISIS that populations of particular species in American zoos could be self-sustaining, individuals such as Seal and Bridgwater hoped to convince the United States Department of the Interior to loosen legislative restrictions on the movement of breeding stock between zoos. In the words of Bridgwater, ISIS offered a ‘tool to demonstrate the value, effectiveness and position of zoos relative to the morass of legislation, emotional outcry, and misinformation currently facing institutions’.Footnote 31 And the strategy indeed worked. In 1976, AAZPA and the Interior Department reached an agreement to downgrade species for which a CSSP report was provided, allowing for more liberal transfer requirements.Footnote 32
The explicit association of ISIS with the long-term survival of captive endangered species served three audiences at once. First, as Bridgwater argued, the system was to show to ‘the world at large that we [the zoos] are capable of rather intelligent and logical action’.Footnote 33 Secondly, stressing ISIS’s link with discussions on federal endangered species legislation helped to convince zoo managers to provide information for, and pay membership fees to, ISIS.Footnote 34 After all, Seal and Bridgwater highlighted that the survival of the zoo as an institution depended on turning its animal populations into CSSPs. Finally, ISIS also explicitly catered to the Interior Department. In a letter to Earl Baysinger, deputy chief of the Interior Department’s Office of Endangered Species and International Activities, Seal wrote that ISIS could provide exactly the information needed for enforcing its legislation in a zoo context.Footnote 35 In this way, the focus on sustained captive breeding helped to sever important links between federal administrators and the zoo world. This translated directly into funding. From the mid-1970s onward, both the Interior Department and AAZPA provided a yearly subsidy of $10,000 to ISIS.Footnote 36 Simultaneously, Seal used ISIS data to immediately prepare petitions to have five species (the tiger, leopard, jaguar, black lemur, and ring-tailed lemur) officially declared as CSSPs.Footnote 37
All this is not to say that Seal’s strategy was uncontroversial. In a letter to ISIS systems manager Linda Murtfeldt, the executive director of ZooAct, George Steele, argued that the creation of a special CSSP status sent ‘the wrong message to Interior and humane societies’, and undermined a general principle of unrestricted ‘inter-zoo transfers’.Footnote 38 In addition to such strategic concerns, there were also scientific criticisms about CSSPs’ taxonomic focus: the species. John Perry, Assistant Director for Conservation at the Washington Zoological Park, argued that, in practice, subspecies were the object of most conservation schemes. He admitted there might be reasons to refocus on the species level, but that this should be ‘a matter of deliberate choice, not of adapting to well-meant but counterproductive regulations’.Footnote 39 Clyde Hill, mammal curator at the equally influential San Diego Zoo, thought along similar lines. Responding to Bridgwater’s claim that ‘the subspecies concept is too complicated for government’, he argued it was ‘not ethical’ to lump together self-sustaining subspecies with non-self-sustaining ones in a single group.Footnote 40 All this offers a reminder of the political nature and real-world impact of taxonomic decisions.Footnote 41 Still, Bridgwater managed to rally most zoo managers around a pragmatic position. In correspondence with AAZPA’s director Robert O. Wagner, he stressed the importance of differentiating the data needed for successful breeding programmes from those needed (more urgently) to comply with federal regulations.Footnote 42 An AAZPA-ISIS Committee meeting in January 1976 indeed recommended using the Interior Department’s definition of CSSPs, rather than ‘what the functional biologist would consider necessary’.Footnote 43 The second might have been more important for the survival of animal populations, but the first was considered crucial for the survival of the zoo as an institution.
Even so, the attention to the long-term viability of captive populations in ISIS circles was more than mere window-dressing. After all, the ISIS team was clearly aware of some worrisome trends. As part of an exploration of how ISIS could contribute to CSSPs, Nathan (Nate) Flesness, a PhD student of Seal’s at the University of Minnesota, set up a study of so-called ‘inbreeding coefficients’ of the Przewalski’s horse. At the time, this species (which was extinct in the wild) was considered a zoo conservation success story. Yet, discussing the results of his study at the Second World Conference on the Breeding of Endangered Species in London in 1976, Flesness painted a bleak picture. He argued that uncoordinated breeding practices, in which a limited number of stallions were strongly over-represented, had led to a very high inbreeding coefficient. Flesness claimed that this would not only affect the offspring’s health, but might even jeopardise the species’ long-term survival.Footnote 44 Worse, according to the people within the ISIS team, the Przewalski’s horse symbolised a wider problem. As zoo managers usually sought mates that were ‘close at hand’, Flesness believed inbreeding was a very widespread phenomenon in zoos. ISIS, again, was proposed as a solution. The system could not only help evaluate ‘the risks associated with inbreeding’, but also develop ‘computer-based methods to measure and reduce them’.Footnote 45 This promissory discourse shaped much of the further developments.
As a tool to avoid inbreeding (and thus establish CSSPs), ISIS incorporated particular scientific theories into its design. These theories, rooted in demography on the one hand and population genetics on the other, were developed in 1975–6 by two young and part-time ISIS staff members. The first was Tom Foose, a PhD student studying ecology at Chicago University; the second was the aforementioned Nate Flesness. Foose took on the demography work. Starting from P. H. Leslie’s 1940s’ modelling within the Oxford Bureau of Animal Population, he developed ideas on how to calculate the ideal sex ratio and age divisions for particular species within the ‘carrying capacity’ provided by zoos.Footnote 46 Flesness for his part used 1920s’ work by population geneticist Sewall Wright to propose a system of ‘maximum avoidance of inbreeding’.Footnote 47
Combining the two approaches, Foose, Flesness, and Seal called for a complete overhaul of existing breeding practices. In their view, zoo managers mostly bred with individuals that were least aggressive, easiest to handle, readily available, and that had a proven record of producing numerous and healthy offspring. They stressed that all of this resulted in inbreeding and ‘unintentional domestication’—both of which would undermine the animals’ adaptive capabilities and compromise potential reintroductions in the future. To preserve genetic diversity, they believed zoos needed to manage the entire captive population of a species as a whole. Such management included: alternating males in breeding programmes, closely managing the age distribution, and circulating animals between institutions based on maximum genetic difference. Hence, they proposed an ideal that required a constant transfer of individuals, preferably on a global level, and a close monitoring of those transfers. This, in turn, necessitated a system that centralised the necessary demographic and genetic information: ISIS (see Figure 2).Footnote 48
Figure 2. How to organize ‘maximum avoidance of inbreeding’? (Flessnes and Seal, ’Gene Pool Conservation and Breeding Strategy for Zoos’, 1975, Typescript, MSZB, ISIS, 103.C.16.9B, Studbook Committee, Gale Library, Minneapolis).
ISIS thus became embroiled in the conceptual and material construction of CSSPs. To this end, the ISIS leadership initiated so-called pedigree, demographic and studbook subsystems in the spring of 1976.Footnote 49 Work on census and physiological norms programmes did continue, but data collection and programming related to the breeding of endangered species took precedence. The latter work was clearly of symbolic importance. It cemented institutional support (from the Interior Department and AAZPA), enabled legal compliance, and it gestured towards the survival of the zoo as an institution. In virtually every publication devoted to ISIS, Seal and his collaborators stressed that ‘modern day zoos are faced with the challenge of developing self-sustaining populations of captive exotic species’. Somewhat over-optimistically, they followed this up by proclaiming that ‘American and European zoos are confronting this challenge head on through the International Species Inventory System (ISIS)’.Footnote 50 The rhetoric resonated widely. When, in 1978, the popular science programme ‘Nova’ devoted an episode to zoos, it featured a voice-over saying that ‘successful breeding means zoos will have to pool genetic information on their animals’. After this statement, images transitioned from zoo enclosures to an interview with Seal. The intermediate frames showed blinking lights and turning computer reels—visualising a computerised future for ex situ conservation.Footnote 51
Creating networks
ISIS’s promoters enveloped their system in an aura of scientific planning and technological innovation. Its databanks, so they argued, could deliver ‘long range collaborative strategies in genetic custodianship’.Footnote 52 It was an appealing promise. By 1978, IBM, which provided the computer for the ISIS headquarters at the Minnesota Zoo, even used this example in advertisements to showcase the potential of its data management systems (Figure 3). Yet, in order to deliver on his promise, Seal and his collaborators needed more than a scientific blueprint and novel technology. They also needed data and, crucially, the involvement of people and institutions that could provide them.
Figure 3. Selling computers through tigers (IBM advertisement in: Scientific American, 238, no.5 (1978): 95.
For ISIS to function, enough (and preferably all) global institutions that engaged in captive breeding programmes had to take part. Its developers explicitly expressed the ambitions to ‘universalise’ such breeding and to ‘store data on every animal in every zoo in most countries of the world’.Footnote 53 Getting those zoos involved was not a given. In the United States, AAZPA’s active propaganda did enable a relatively high participation among the association’s paying members. Yet, there was resistance, too. Some saw the development of ISIS as a sign that ‘bureaucratic agencies’ were taking over American zoos as ‘private initiatives’.Footnote 54 Others felt the system was not geared to smaller zoos with more common species, and they questioned the necessity of ‘databanking woodchucks and raccoons’.Footnote 55 Additionally, some zoos enrolled for a few years, but then dropped out again. To address all this, the ISIS staff ultimately set up a ‘phone polling exercise’, of which the goal was ‘not so much polling’, but ‘massaging and re-recruitment’.Footnote 56 Clearly, building a functioning information system proved as much a social exercise as a technological one.
Expanding beyond North America proved to be even more difficult. Initially, ISIS was clearly a United States initiative, funded through national institutions (the Interior Department, AAZPA and AAZV) and responding to national legislation. With an all-American board, the ‘international’ in the title was certainly premature. Still, the cross-border ambitions were clearly there. In 1976, Bridgwater explicitly stated in an internal memo that ‘our primary service and products, namely conservation, education and animals, have become international commodities that do not respect national boundaries and involve both international communication and coordination’.Footnote 57 At an international zoo conference in Calgary, Alberta, in 1976, European zoo agents seemed to show interest, but, when ISIS representative Marvin Jones travelled through Europe, he only found the zoos of Rotterdam and Copenhagen willing to join. At a London conference, the local organiser Richard Brambell did not even allow him to present the data system, which Jones ascribed to Brambell’s anti-American attitudes. More generally, Jones reported that many of the ‘old line leaders’ of European zoos proved ‘opposed to ISIS’.Footnote 58 The universal blueprint for data exchange clearly faced local sensitivities.
It is important to understand that ISIS was launched in (and partially exemplified) a period in which the geographical centre of zoo science shifted. For a long time dominated by European zoos, American zoo biologists increasingly dominated the global zoo circuit in the 1970s. The application of population genetics to zoo breeding was largely an Anglo-American phenomenon, with many European zoo curators having little experience in this area. Ernst Lang, for instance, the Basel zoo director known as an expert on captive breeding, explicitly addressed Seal to get advice on ‘the management of the genes’.Footnote 59 Others, like the influential Cologne curator Waltraut Zimmermann, continued to emphasise that morphological characters were more crucial for breeding decisions than genetic ones.Footnote 60 In any case, by spreading North American understandings and priorities, ISIS carried a hint of cultural imperialism. Initially, ISIS committee and subcommittee members were without an exception North Americans, and in early ISIS versions, English was the only language available for entering common species names.Footnote 61 Further practical problems contributed to European reluctance. Some zoos that initially expressed interest shied away from the costs—especially as taxes on sending information sheets by post proved higher in Europe than in the United States.Footnote 62 Fears that CITES would render cross-border exchange virtually impossible also cooled the enthusiasm for taking part in a system managed from across the Atlantic.Footnote 63
It was only through direct and time-consuming informal contacts that the ISIS network slowly expanded beyond its North American core. Jones’s stay in Rotterdam, for instance, where he consulted on the entry of data, lasted almost a month. To Bridgwater he reported that it had taken ages ‘just to determine what the zoo had, when it came to ages, etc.’.Footnote 64 Such efforts were important. The established contacts and continuous networking activities meant that the number of participating west European zoos could gradually increase in the 1980s.Footnote 65 Expansion on other continents was even more laborious and slow, and establishing a global reach proved to be a matter of decades. A report from 1999 would still mention that ‘zoos in the developing world’ were ‘poorly represented’. The abstract language of science and technology had made universalism seem easy. The report, however, highlighted obstacles that were of a very mundane kind: ‘economics, staff training and language’.Footnote 66
The fact that ISIS was not the only organisation with universal ambitions to coordinate the breeding of endangered animals further complicated matters. In the mid-1970s, it entered a field in which several established institutions were already active. There was, for instance, the International Zoo Yearbook, the London-based periodical that served as a clearinghouse of information between zoos across the world. There were the ‘international studbooks’ that assembled pedigree information on specific endangered species. Additionally, there were the International Union of Directors of Zoological Gardens (IUDZG) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which functioned as meeting places for the (partially overlapping) elites of the zoo and conservation world.Footnote 67 The strategy of the ISIS leadership was to align themselves with these various bodies, enter their boards and committees, and incorporate their data. Again, this required intensive networking.
Early on, ISIS staff established friendly relations with Peter Olney of the International Zoo Yearbook to exchange information, and they contacted studbook keepers to standardise their data entries and incorporate them into ISIS.Footnote 68 Relations with IUDZG proved more cumbersome, however. From an American perspective, the union appeared to be an archaic old boys’ network, which ISIS officials felt was unrepresentative and ill informed.Footnote 69 Still, ISIS representatives decided to attend IUDZG meetings to push their agenda.Footnote 70 At IUCN, finally, they managed to secure a seat at the table, too. In 1976, Seal was appointed as a special consultant to IUCN’s Species Survival Commission, and, in 1979, he became the chair of its Captive Breeding Specialist Group—leaving the directorship of ISIS to Flesness from then onward. These ties to IUCN not only allowed Seal and Flesness to argue for the special significance of zoos for conservation, but also to promote ISIS as their tool.Footnote 71
The realignment of the zoo world in the 1970s (with ISIS at its centre) aimed at the global consolidation of captive breeding as an accepted conservation strategy. This was not uncontested. Scepticism towards zoos still lingered within the IUCN, and at the 1976 General Assembly a small delegation of zoo representatives only narrowly succeeded in averting what they saw as ‘a potentially disastrous anti-zoo resolution’.Footnote 72 In this context, the assertiveness of Seal and his collaborators stands out. Not only did Seal claim that ISIS would bolster ex situ conservation, but he even argued that zoo expertise would ultimately benefit traditional conservation in the wild. With wild populations becoming increasingly small, scattered, and isolated, protected areas were turning into ‘megazoos’. Seal believed that, in order to avoid inbreeding, such megazoos would require management tools similar to those of actual zoos—tools such as ISIS.Footnote 73 For the time being, claiming a role for ISIS in the conservation of non-captive populations was certainly over-ambitious. Yet, through multi-level networking activities, the system did slowly gather transnational visibility.
Animal bodies and human labour
The establishment of the ISIS network coincided with concrete transfers of animal bodies. A good example, again with Seal in a central role, concerns the management of captive Siberian tigers. From the mid-1970s onward, the subspecies already constituted one of the theoretical test cases of ISIS.Footnote 74 Working towards practical applications over the following years, Seal simultaneously acted on a national and global stage. At the national level, he managed to launch a Species Survival Plan for the Siberian tiger in North America under the auspices of AAZPA—the first of its kind. At the same time, he promoted such plans globally as a model for the management of endangered species within the Captive Breeding Specialist Group.Footnote 75 All this mattered for individual Siberian tigers. By analysing ISIS data, Seal had come to realise that the North American captive population was highly inbred and in urgent need of ‘new bloodlines’. Using personal contacts with the Moscow zoo director, Vladimir Spitsin, he managed to trade three young tigers from wild-caught stock for a California sea lion. The tigers, named Tulip, Alisa, and Astra (or, more prosaically, 2430, 2431, and 2432) were flown to Omaha, New York and Indianapolis in 1983, accompanied by Seal himself. The media hyped the transfer as ‘a fresh genetic endowment’ from the Soviet Union.Footnote 76 To contribute to the maximum avoidance of inbreeding, Seal planned to move the young tigers from zoo to zoo and have them sire at least fifteen offspring each. In practice, both the moving and procreating proved less straightforward than anticipated, but the three tigers did bring ten, nine, and eleven cubs to the North American gene pool.Footnote 77
Interestingly, the physical movement of the tigers from Moscow preceded the extension of ISIS itself into the communist bloc. Only in the mid-1980s, Seal managed to mobilise a grant from the Pew Trust to waive costs for Eastern European zoos to take part in ISIS.Footnote 78 Apart from Moscow, ISIS also welcomed Leipzig zoo—the East-German institution that held the international studbook of the Siberian tiger, and that, like Moscow, had recently sent three Siberian tigers to the United States.Footnote 79 Like in other examples of infrastructural globalism, ISIS thus gradually managed to function across the Cold War divide—albeit at the expense of a lot of personal effort.Footnote 80 Through individual contacts and tough negotiations with tiger studbook keeper Siegfried Seifert, Seal succeeded in having the latter’s data actually entered into the system. A witness to the negotiations remembered that ‘surrendering the decades of studbook information to ISIS … across the big pond was understandably a tall order for Seifert’, particularly given an existing fear among central European zoo directors that this would enable ‘the Americans to control assignment of breeding stock, perhaps to their advantage’.Footnote 81 The movement of data and animals indeed constituted closely entangled political acts, and, as such, both relied on diplomatic skill and hard work.
As important as creating border-crossing networks to enable an exchange of data and tigers, was engaging individual ISIS users to perform the daily routines to make infrastructural globalism function. It is on this level that ultimately most complications arose. Despite the imagery that accompanied computing in the 1970s, ISIS still required a lot of human intellectual and manual labour. Zoo representatives filled in long numeric codes on elaborate data sheets, using a series of heavy directories that had to (but did not always) assure taxonomic and procedural homogeneity. They then had to send the sheets by mail to Minneapolis in order to keypunch them. Subsequently, a magnetic tape was transported to the Bureau of Information Services, a division of the State of Minnesota, and the University Computer Centre, for use in a mainframe computer—at that point an IBM System/370 Model 158. It was at this Bureau that ISIS’s actual centre of calculation—to use Bruno Latour’s terminology—was situated.Footnote 82 There, the ISIS staff generated inventories of individual zoos as well as reports of general trends across other zoos (so-called species distribution reports). They sent those reports back on paper and microfiche with relative time intervals. Zoo managers, who often did not have microfilm readers, could sometimes only read the latter using microscopes.Footnote 83 Looking back at the procedures over forty years later, Flesness described it as ‘all very awkward’.Footnote 84
In the 1970s, several paying participants proved unhappy, too. Joel Wallach of Overton Zoo Park wrote Bridgwater in 1976 to complain that ‘our curators feel that the filling in of information requires a lot of time, and that there is nothing in return’.Footnote 85 Along similar lines, George Speidel of Milwaukee County Zoo wrote: ‘It is one thing for someone at a university to sit down and carefully fill out all these forms. But carrying this all out in the field will require an entirely new department. … If ISIS is to survive, practicality is to be considered’.Footnote 86 Bridgwater for his part complained about members’ misguided expectations about what ISIS could offer. In 1977, he wrote to AAZPA’s then president, Don Wagner: ‘They think it consists of magic buttons, which just need to be pressed for answers to all kinds of questions.’ In fact, he added, retrieval was still largely ‘a matter of reviewing existing records by hand’.Footnote 87 Even AAZPA board members themselves seemed to have excessive expectations. In a letter describing an official AAZPA visit to the ISIS premises in 1980, Flesness wrote about ‘widespread myths about large computers and 40 story buildings’.Footnote 88 Grand visions about the automated data system clashed with everyday reality. Of course, the problems were surmountable. Most participants in the ISIS network could be convinced to put in the necessary work, and piecemeal adaptations to the system gradually eased its use. Still, returning complaints in correspondence show the system did not rely on magic, but on sometimes frustrating labour.
Ultimately, ISIS was a connective technology. The connections it fostered were designed to enable the flow of abstracted data and concrete animal bodies. Embracing the ideal of CSSPs, the ISIS staff conceived globally scattered populations as wholes. Hence, through the digital, they aimed for an elimination of physical distance. Yet, ISIS’s connection work was clearly not just digital, but always social as well. It did not just rely on machine calculations, but also on networking activities in boardrooms and at conferences, and on extensive form filling by zoo staff across the world. Despite IBM’s calculating power, physical space always continued to matter. This showed, for instance, in the geographically highly uneven reception of ISIS, and in the slow and expensive practice of sending paper sheets and heavy instruction manuals across oceans by mail. If anything, rolling out ISIS was a laborious enterprise.
Conclusion
The creators of ISIS had aimed to restructure long-established global flows of zoo animals. From the 1800s until well into the twentieth century, public zoos had a reputation as places where wild-caught animals came to die.Footnote 89 ISIS promised to offer an alternative. Its global data infrastructure sought to turn zoological gardens into networked places that served the global breeding and survival of endangered species. Yet, while the system changed the way zoos functioned, it did not do so to the extent, or in the ways, its originators envisioned.
From the mid-1970s until today, the main legitimising ground of ISIS remained the same: enabling the long-term survival of endangered animals in captivity.Footnote 90 While the promise of a ‘global zoo’ through datafication failed to materialise in the 1970s, technological innovations throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s kept the original idea alive. Floppy disks and CD-ROMs replaced heavy paper reports and unreadable microfilms; PCs became more widely available; ISIS developed its own software systems (first called ARKS and then ZIMS); the number of potential reports and the information it contained increased; the internet emerged.Footnote 91 Artificial insemination eased the circulation of hereditary material as the movement of semen partially replaced the movement of animal bodies.Footnote 92 It all reinvigorated initial visions of endangered genes freely flowing across the globe according to a digitised management scheme.
Yet, while ISIS did increasingly streamline ex situ conservation across the world, the ultimate goal of a closed global zoo circuit that optimally manages genetic material proved hard to realise. In 1999, a report indicated that 30% of the acquisitions or removals recorded in ISIS came from or went to unknown entities: ‘small pet shops, ranches, natural resource departments, private individuals’. Of the specimens transferred between ISIS members, 15 to 30% remained unrecorded.Footnote 93 In an interview in 2021, Flesness still estimated that only half of the endangered and threatened species in North American, European, and Asian zoos had management plans based on demographic and genetic data. On top of that, he believed that zoos implemented recommendations resulting from such plans only in about half of the cases. As the major reason for this state of affairs, he highlighted the amount of work involved—notably filling data gaps, correcting mistakes, analysing the resulting information and practically organising the transport of animals (or their genes).Footnote 94 Despite technological advancement, non-automated labour indeed continues to be crucial in managing self-sustaining populations, hampering the realisation of ISIS’s original ideals.
Often, historians have assumed that the advent of computers brought a radical and sudden transformation of existing knowledge practices. Jon Agar has already indicated how such a representation glosses over long-term continuities and gradual change.Footnote 95 This is clearly the case for ISIS. The system built on pre-existing practices and technologies, ranging from patient records to punch-card censuses and studbooks. Its power as a management instrument depended on the extension of a social network of data providers, and, consequently, it grew only incrementally. Furthermore, the laborious growth of ISIS’s network was always highly context-dependent. The system germinated in a time and place of systems euphoria: 1970s Minnesota. Its focus on ex situ conservation through genetics and demography was not a pre-given, but resulted from its mid-1970s entanglement with particular US American institutions (such as AAZPA and the Interior Department) and legal instruments (the Endangered Species Act). From then onward, ISIS’s categorisation, datafication and globalisation of captive animals came with a form of genetic reductionism. This drove a wider development in ex situ conservation, in which, with the words of Matthew Chrulew, ‘embodied and emplaced beings are decontextualised and conceived as calculable and controllable genetic information’.Footnote 96 Spreading and applying this vision globally was never just a matter of technology. It also involved a hard-won geographical and numerical expansion of memberships, the linking up of the system to new global and regional legislative regulations, the development of new manuals and training workshops, the labour-intensive correction of double entries and mistakes, and a continued massaging and re-recruitment of members and funders. For all these reasons, computerised data systems did not lead to the overnight creation of a ‘global zoo’. Rather, they were part of a decade-long development that remained slow, laborious, and (until this day) incomplete.
When ISIS turned into Species360 in 2016, the organisation came with a new branding: The ‘0’ of the ‘360’ in the logo was a simplified globe looked at from outer space; the accompanying catchphrase was ‘global information serving conservation’.Footnote 97 The imagery literally and figuratively offers a view from afar, suggesting once again abstraction, detachment and neutrality.Footnote 98 Yet, looking at the development of ex situ conservation through the lens of infrastructural inversion has offered an altogether different image. The project of ISIS was always (and Species360 remains) situated and political, material and embodied. It is these aspects, I have argued, that explain both its labour-intensive character and its relative power. Infrastructural globalism ultimately is hard work.
On a broader level, the history of ISIS serves as a reminder that infrastructural globalism extends its influence to non-human lives. For all its limitations, the ‘globalist information’ it provided served the conceptualisation of a globally organised form of ex situ conservation, directly influencing the transcontinental flows of captive Siberian tigers, Przewalski’s horses, and animals of many other species. The (partial and hard-won) globalisation it enabled was a more-than-human one.Footnote 99
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Monica Vasile for providing me access to her interview with Nate Flesness, and Vanessa Bateman, Vincent Bijman, Cyrus Mody, Tom Quick, Geert Somsen and again Monica Vasile for their comments on an earlier draft.
Financial support
This article was written as part of the VICI project Moving Animals (VI.C.181.010), funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
Competing Interests
The author declares none.
Raf De Bont holds the Chair for the History of Science and the Environment at Maastricht University. He is the author of Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Nature’s Diplomats: Science, Internationalism and Preservation, 1920–1960 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).
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