In 1967, Los Angeles Zoo began breeding mountain tapirs from one pair, and the effort still shapes the species today

Mountain tapirs are among the hardest animals to breed in a zoo. One of the earliest successes was documented in a study in the International Zoo Yearbook: the Los Angeles Zoo's program that began in 1967 with a single breeding pair. Decades later, the founding pair remains central to the way mountain tapirs exist in zoos today.

The start of the breeding effort

In 1967, a young male mountain tapir was acquired by the Los Angeles Zoo. A female joined him soon after, and the two were paired. There was very little information on how to breed these animals in captivity because none had succeeded at this before. The Los Angeles Zoo notes in its own history of the milestone that on June 4, 1977, ten years after the pair first arrived, the Los Angeles Zoo recorded the first mountain tapir ever born in a zoo. That birth was an important breakthrough for a species long resistant to captive breeding.


A slow, difficult species to breed

Mountain tapirs, also known as Andean tapirs or woolly tapirs, live in the cool cloud forests of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. They are the smallest tapirs in the world and the only tapir species not found in a tropical rainforest. They have a thick woolly coat to keep them warm, even at high altitude. Their long, flexible snout even acts as a snorkel in mountain streams. They also reproduce slowly. Zoo biologists report that a female gestates one calf for about 13 months and normally breeds only every other year. That slow pace is part of why the 1977 birth was so important, and why the species has struggled to build up numbers in zoos ever since.

A genetic bottleneck built into the population

Because the Los Angeles Zoo's program grew out of just two animals, the captive population it produced started with an unusually narrow genetic base. This is a basic principle of small-population biology. If a species is founded by only one or two animals, all their offspring will be closely related to those founders because there is no other source of genes to draw upon. This is important because a small founding population limits the amount of genetic diversity a species can maintain over time. There are few chances to avoid mating close relatives in future generations, as there are so few unrelated animals, which increases the risk of health problems and lowers fertility. It is a well-known problem in conservation breeding in general, and the mountain tapir's decades-long dependence on a single founding pair makes it a clear real-world example of the problem.

Where mountain tapirs stand today

Mountain tapirs are still very rare in zoos. Among zoos in North America, mountain tapirs are found almost exclusively at the Los Angeles Zoo, which still cares for a small group today. The zoo says its veterinary team has decades of hands-on experience with the species at home and regularly travels to Ecuador to visit and GPS-collar wild mountain tapirs.

Conditions in the wild are little better. A peer-reviewed paper in the journal Oryx estimated fewer than 2,500 individuals exist in the wild, mainly due to hunting and habitat loss. The threats are the same today, and the mountain tapir is already lost from parts of its historic range in the high Andes.

Why this decades-old effort still matters

The 1967 pairing and its descendant born in 1977 were never going to be the answer to the mountain tapir's problems. But they showed something important at the time: this shy, slow-breeding species could breed in zoos after all. Almost 60 years later, descendants of that pair are still the reason mountain tapirs occupy zoos across North America.

It’s also a reminder that there is a real trade-off in conservation work. A small population of a species originating from a single founding pair can keep a species visible, studied, and available for the public to learn from. But there are genetic constraints that are not easy to undo later. That trade-off for mountain tapirs is still being worked out, one cautious birth at a time.