Zoos bring together different animal species that would never encounter each other in the wild. On occasion, this can have unforeseen consequences. When in 2010 at the Wuppertal Zoo one polar bear died and another fell severely ill, zoo veterinarians were at a loss as to the cause of the symptoms. It has now been shown that the bears were infected with a recombinant zebra-derived virus that had jumped into other species, as reported today by an international team of researchers led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in the journal Current Biology. Such species-jumping viruses, if not detected, may threaten the conservation mission of zoos.

In the current edition of "Science", an international team of voice researchers and cognitive biologists at the University of Vienna, and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin, Germany led by Christian Herbst, Angela Stoeger, Roland Frey and Tecumseh Fitch, provides new insights into the production of Elephant communication. The so-called "infrasounds", i.e. sounds with pitches below the range of human hearing, are found to be produced with the same physical mechanism as human speech or singing.

Scientists have now demonstrated that the Tasmanian tiger, also known as Tasmanian wolf or thylacine, possessed limited genetic variability prior to its extinction. This might have been caused by geographical isolation when Tasmania was isolated from mainland Australia 10-13 thousand years ago.