Why no species is too small to save
Chester Zoo's Chief Executive Officer, Jamie Christon, shares his insight on our vital work to save one of the UK's rarest coastal plants.
Fewer than 5,000. That's all that remains of one of the UK's rarest coastal plants - and that number would be smaller still without a quiet, painstaking effort that has blossomed in a greenhouse at Chester Zoo.
Ask most people about our conservation work and they'll talk about animals. They'd be right, but they'd only be telling half the story.
Last week, more than 500 shore dock plants, grown from seed in our on-site nursery, were planted out in the wild at the dunes of Newborough, Anglesey - one of its last remaining habitats on Earth. Wales holds a significant proportion of the entire global population of this plant. Without careful work done over many months in a polytunnel at the zoo, largely out of public sight, this species would be even closer to the edge.
Our mission has always been broader than animals. Protecting life on our planet means protecting all life, including the plants that underpin the ecosystems every other species depends upon. Lose the plants and you lose everything built on top of them - the ectotherms, the birds, the mammals. The whole web unravels.
Shore dock requires a special licence just to grow it. Chester Zoo is proud to have one. Our team was entrusted with precious seeds, propagated hundreds of plants under carefully controlled conditions and mimicked the sandy coastal substrate the species needs to thrive. When the plants had grown strong enough, we helped return them to the wild.
This only happened because of the partnership behind this project. The RSPB, Natural Resources Wales and Plantlife, brought together by the Natur am Byth programme, restored the habitat itself - clearing scrub, improving freshwater conditions and creating the space shore dock needs to establish and spread. Growing the plants is only half the challenge. If the environment isn't right, there's little point staging a reintroduction. Preventing extinction involves teamwork.
Chester Zoo's conservation work isn't confined to headline-grabbing species. We're equally committed to the unglamorous and the overlooked. Shore dock is unlikely to trend on social media. But in the dunes of Newborough, it's quietly doing something extraordinary - it's coming back to life.
I'm immensely proud of our Plant Team, our partners, and the visitors, members and supporters who help fund work like this. No species is too small to save.
Jamie Christon, Chief Executive Officer, Chester Zoo