 We're here with Deputy Director of the San Francisco Zoo and Gardens, Joe Fitting, who's going to tell us all about the amazing transformation that's happened to this space turning a 1930s building into a brand new exhibit that's part of an active conservation program. These grottos were built in 1937 and they're massive cement structures. So what we've done is take two bear grottos and we used to house polar bears, grizzly bears, speckled bears, brown bears, black bears, it was a real area to see bears and we've taken two of them and turned them into one and that's a challenge because over my shoulder you probably can see the 16 foot deep moat and that was kind of the barrier that prevented the bears from getting out. You look over to the other side you'll notice the big glass wall to bring the audience really up close so they can see these amazing wolves and then you'll also notice we filled in one of the moats. So that gives the audience again a real great opportunity. This other side, well the moat remains and what that does is give it a little, a lot of verticality to the exhibit so the wolves will go down into that and explore it and the keepers will enrich it and encourage them to do a lot of movement. So it was a real challenge and what we did is took a finger wall away and you'll see the little interpretive zone right here and this will give another opportunity for the audience to really walk in and really see these amazing animals. Great and so these wolves that we have now at the San Francisco Zoo, they are part of a conservation program. Is that correct? Yes they are. You know it's a state of many animals and plants on this world. They almost blinked out in the early 40s, 50s. I think they were down to five wolves and these are Mexican gray wolves which are a subspecies. One of the smaller wolves and they're found in the southern part of the United States and northern Mexico. So they almost blinked out because of you know the prejudice, let's be honest. People were shooting them just because they were wolves and so the federal government stepped in with the Endangered Species Act. That's probably one of the most important conservation tools that was created and has a rippling effect now to this day. So through this Endangered Species Act the wolf became a protected species. They started a recovery plan, a breeding plan, an education plan, and a research plan and we're all part of that. As these wolves are part of an active conservation program, has there been any different considerations made when designing the exhibit? Well the federal government has really mandated that we keep these guys as wild as we can. So they cannot be managed like the normal animal you would hear at the zoo. We try to make most animals really receptive to the keepers in contact. In this case we're going to really have to keep them kind of wild. And so keepers are not going to interact with these animals, they'll have opportunities to do research on them. With our wellness initiative we're spending about $30,000 putting cameras and tones to alert the animals to move around, we'll monitor their behaviors. We also have an interesting heat rock over here. You know in San Francisco it can get cold in the summer, we get kind of foggy. So we have a nice heat rock over here and there will be food dropping down on it episodically to encourage them to come up and that will give the audience another chance to see these amazing animals. Nice, are there any other features that we should look for in the exhibit kind of thinking about the terrain that they come from and making this exhibit seem kind of like that in case they would be released into the wild? Yeah, you know if you look over my shoulder one of the things you'll see is these dirt mounds. We brought these dirt mounds in to get the wolves up into the little dens you kind of see tucked into the walls. For the bears most of them never exploited those penetrations. So this is a great opportunity to get those wolves up in a higher platform which they will do because they like to be in a higher platform. The planning scheme is on the left side here it's more desert and on the right side it's more forest and that is kind of encompassing the habitat of the Mexican gray wolf. What's fun about this exhibit also you don't see it but in the back we have a big bank of cages that will be opened and communal and they connect with these grottos. So at night time the wolves will be able to roll around all night long because like most wolves they have a couple hours up, couple hours down, couple hours up, couple hours down. So we're going to encourage them to roll around, exercise through our enrichment programs. These tones, these cameras will figure out how to encourage them to do that. So it really is a great opportunity for research and again conservation and education. That's the primary goal. Come on over and see this 100 acre classroom. Fantastic, thanks so much Joe. I'm Blair Basdrich, thanks for watching. You can follow this week in Science at Twist Science on Twitter. You can watch all of our videos on twist.org slash YouTube and find out more about our show at twist.org. Oh and remember it's all in your head.