An entire block of talks on Saturday morning centred on Citizen Conservation and our major goal of conservation breeding programmes for endangered species. Our Curator of Research and Zoology, Johannes Penner, kicked things off by presenting the developments at CC over the past year to the audience of over a hundred people gathered in the large lecture theatre of the Natural History Museum as part of our ‘Update 2026’. Afterwards, co-founder and species manager Heiko Werning went into amphibian-specific detail and presented one of our programmes, along with the mechanics behind it: ‘From a lost species to a stable conservation breeding programme – the Mallorcan midwife toad (Alytes muletensis) as the prototype for Citizen Conservation’s first studbook’. Incidentally, the hosts played a prominent role in this, as one of the breeding lines of these charming little toads can be traced directly back to just three specimens brought over 40 years ago by the then director of the Stuttgart Natural History Museum and subsequently bred at Wilhelma – an impressive lineage spanning numerous generations, so far without any discernible inbreeding depression and thus, from a purely scientific perspective, a remarkable contribution to our understanding of this species, which remains critically endangered.

Holger Kraus from Zurich Zoo, who is also a member of our Scientific Advisory Board, gave a presentation entitled ‘Establishing an ex situ population of the Blue-sided leaf frog (Agalychnis annae)”, impressively demonstrated how close cooperation between zoos and private keepers can, in a very short space of time, set up a complete conservation breeding programme for an endangered species from scratch: using confiscated, smuggled eggs and tadpoles of this beautiful tree frog from Costa Rica, the zoo was able to establish breeding groups which, after just one year, produced offspring of their own and were subsequently distributed via CC to over a dozen keepers – thus, hopefully, laying the foundations for a long-term conservation breeding programme.

DGHT Vice-President Christian Bittner provided an update on his presentation from last year regarding his experiences in breeding the Titicaca water frog (Telmatobius culeus). Among other things, he succeeded for the first time in recording the calls of this aquatic, peculiar amphibian.

CC Advisory Board member Fabian Schmidt, curator at Basel Zoo, introduced the Rio Pescado stubfoot toad (Atelopus balios), which had previously been thought to be extinct, as well as the Sakishima long-tailed lizard (Takydromus dorsalis), which has recently been added to the CC programme. Both species are being bred very successfully by the zoo, which is also deeply committed to CC in other ways and is planning participatory spaces for CC participants as part of its masterplan, drawing on its long-standing experience with public participation at the ‘Zolli’ Children’s Zoo. And because it will be some time yet before this is realised, the zoo is planning to make interim use of the site by installing its own CC containers. An outstanding project! Equally outstanding is the Alpine Salamander Centre of Excellence, which CC initiated to save highly endangered subspecies of the ‘Amphibian of the Year 2026’ and for which we have funded housing facilities at the Sachsenhagen Wildlife Rescue Centre. CC staff member Uwe Seidel presented this ambitious project. To round off the series of presentations, Nicolas Chalwatzis took the floor to report on his hard-won successes in the husbandry and breeding of the Phantasmal poison frog, a critically endangered poison dart frog from Ecuador, which, somewhat surprisingly, has proved to be quite a tough nut to crack in captivity.