The large marsh grasshopper was once ever-present across Eastern England’s wetlands. But after decades of habitat destruction, these handsome insects are now fragmented and locally extinct, holding out in the wettest fens, valleys, and peat bogs of the New Forest and Dorset.
Now, London-based Citizen Zoo is trying to bring them back—and it’s planning to do it by turning regular people into zookeepers. Reintroducing the grasshoppers to restored wetland sites across their historic range can bring huge benefits to ecosystems and food chains, says Citizen Zoo’s 30-year-old CEO Lucas Ruzo. “We came up with this citizen keeper concept, which is basically normal people being zookeepers in their own homes, breeding and rearing grasshoppers,” he says.
After a crash course in grasshopper husbandry, an initial group of about a dozen zookeepers were given a kit that included between 30 and 50 eggs, a heat-emitting incandescent bulb, and a glass enclosure. For the volunteer keepers—so far including retired wildlife professionals, a mother of two eager kids, and corporate teams raising a brood together in an office block—each day requires little more than incubating and collecting food. “It’s as simple as a light bulb and then a jar of fresh grass every morning,” says Ruzo.
Each keeper can raise a brood every four or five weeks, and they’re then released at two secret locations. Since the first release in Norfolk in 2019, several hundred hand-reared grasshoppers have helped to build self-sustaining wild populations, with the “end mission” of restoration throughout their range, says Ruzo.
On kitchen tables and in kids’ bedrooms, this zookeeping experiment aims to show that the regular person has a role to play in a crowdsourced response to the Holocene extinction. The project, named A Hop of Hope, is typical of Citizen Zoo’s approach, which invites supporters to get their hands dirty in captive breeding programs, translocating species and reintroducing them to restored sites.
Crucially, this process takes the job of captive breeding out of the hands of zoological institutions and democratizes a so-far prohibitively expensive process. And while such DIY rewilding might sound like a recipe for ecological disaster (or at least the occasional grasshopper prison-break), Citizen Zoo has earned support from UK conservation agency Natural England and environment minister Zac Goldsmith, plus financial backing from Cambridge University’s Social Ventures incubator and the United Nations Environment Programme.
When not tasking volunteers with hand-rearing animals, Citizen Zoo gets them involved in upgrading habitats, such as in its Get inVOLEd project, which aims to bring back endangered water voles—the UK’s fastest declining wild mammal—to Kingston’s Hogsmill River. Ruzo says Citizen Zoo aims to “rewild people” first, starting in Kingston by reaching out to thousands of locals to educate them about the charismatic rodent’s disappearance, training 60 volunteers, and working with local carers to clear overgrowth, build wildlife ponds, and improve local floral biodiversity. In spring 2022, they’ll release 150 voles.
Most eye-catching is its goal of reintroducing beavers—hunted to extinction in the UK four centuries ago—to London. In January, Citizen Zoo set up the London Beaver Working Group, an informal partnership with conservation organizations such as the Beaver Trust and private landowners, to establish how. “We really want to see beavers return to London, and they’re going to arrive in London sooner or later,” says Ruzo. Beavers have been in London’s rural hinterlands since being reintroduced by Kent Wildlife Trust in 2001. “They have really good powers of dispersal. They’re a species that’s really good at moving upstream into new areas, so we’ve taken a proactive approach.” Ruzo hopes they will soon be reintroduced to Hackney Wick marshes, his local go-to spot for natural connections.
Citizen Zoo launched in 2016 as a standard-bearer for rewilding after Ruzo had seen conventional wildlife charities’ lukewarm embrace of the idea while studying for a masters in conservation science at Imperial College London, following a degree in zoology. Ruzo, who idolized Steve Irwin as a kid, was born in Denmark but spent his childhood moving around Europe. In Portugal, his family built an aviary full of parrots and other birds that he and his grandmother found in the local vivid wildlife markets, which Ruzo later learned had likely been illegally trafficked from Southern Africa and South America.
It was an early lesson in digging deeper and ensuring that the feel-good benefits of working in nature actually matched up with doing good: “We thought we were saving them—my parents were kind, but didn’t realize they were feeding into the illegal wildlife trade at the time.” In work, he dodged the conservation norm of decamping to an African reserve, opting to push rewilding closer to home, and launching his own startup in lieu of finding a job at a charity. He launched Citizen Zoo as a social enterprise to avoid the charity sector’s “boom-and-bust cycle of dependency,” which can cause long-term ecosystem restoration efforts to be jeopardized by the ever-changing scope of philanthropic funding.
So far, grasshoppers have been an ideal test—“they’re fast breeders, they’re relatively easy to take care of, and they don’t have serious biosecurity needs”—but they are far from the only British species in need of support, with more than 2,000 on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, the leading database of the world’s threatened species, which includes basking sharks and puffins.
“This model could work for loads of other species, but it’s also not appropriate for many,” says Ruzo. “We’ve recently been approached by another group that wanted to try and adapt it for reptiles. It’s still too early to tell, but it doesn’t feel like it’s suitable.”
Some more straightforward candidates for home-rearing include harvest mice, whose populations have rebounded following reintroductions, Ruzo says. Breeding amphibians typically takes expertise, as they’re vulnerable to disease, but citizen keepers could play a role in “head-starting” threatened species such as the pool frog—rearing them from frogspawn to semi-adults to avoid tadpole predation.
“I think the coolest thing about this citizen keeper thing is that it’s shifted the perspective of what people can do and can support,” says Ruzo. The incentive of reintroducing a “token” charismatic species can push landowners to tackle the more stubborn issues of habitat degradation that led to countless other species’ decline. “By restoring habitat for grasshoppers, we’re encouraging changes in behavior and perspective in the landowner, which will also have a cascading effect for other wildlife. That’s, at least, the hope.”