Along the way, Walt Disney World is showing that enough people are fascinated with wildlife conservation that endangered-species programs can have tourist appeal.

Under a program run by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Disney scientists and technicians are running a captive-breeding program of Key Largo woodrats in Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park. In the meantime, federal biologists are trying to find ways to preserve the Key Largo woodrats' remaining natural habitat and make it safer for them.

Much of the work at Disney, and much of what is being learned about the once-little-known rodent, is displayed on a bank of computer and video monitors next to a lab window on Animal Kingdom's Rafiki's Planet Watch tour. Visitors who take the train to the tour's biology station get overviews of a variety of conservation efforts. Those who stop at the woodrat window can watch the monitors and talk to researchers and other program staff who take shifts answering questions.

Not many scientists get to do their work in front of a crowd. The visibility only helps, according to Catharine Wheaton, a Disney reproductive endocrinologist.

"This is probably a different place for a scientist to be," added research specialist Katie Leighty.

Leighty recalled a recent encounter with an 8-year-old girl who, Leighty thinks, might grow up to become a scientist. "She knew so much. Oh my gosh, it was so inspiring," Leighty said. "That fuels our passion."

The furry, brown-and-white Key Largo woodrat makes for a nice draw.

"They're very cute," said Anne Savage, a Disney senior conservation biologist.

They're also difficult to study in the wild because they seek isolation, are nocturnal and shy, and like to build nests under things so they can live in hiding, Savage said. As a result, the Disney research, which began in 2005 with 12 woodrats, has revealed all sorts of previously unknown behaviors, many of which occur in plain view of theme-park visitors. Nursing pups hold on to the mother and get dragged around when she goes somewhere, for example. Also, adults like to stand on hind legs and box. They like to climb. They eat seeds, leaves and flowers.

"We have 27 animals right now. We've had 15 pups. That's the most exciting thing," Savage said. "We've figured out how to breed them in captivity. Some of the pups born at Disney's Animal Kingdom have become moms themselves."

Yet the species remains very troubled.

Its population now is confined to a single island -- Key Largo -- at the north end of the Florida Keys. It lives in tropical hardwood forests, mainly in two protected areas. Much of its historical range has been plowed into subdivisions of $1 million homes.

The other animals that threaten it are not all native, said Cindy Schulz, the endangered-species supervisor in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Vero Beach office. A large number of feral cats now roam Key Largo, hunting prey. A few months ago, when the signal from one woodrat's radio collar meandered off into an open meadow and stopped, researchers made an unsettling discovery after someone went out to check: Burmese pythons, large snakes not native to the United States, had spread to the Keys from the Florida Everglades. One of them had swallowed the unfortunate woodrat.

The Fish & Wildlife Service is trying to limit the woodrat's enemies to its natural predators by controlling the island's cat population and by getting rid of the Burmese pythons, but neither undertaking is easy, Schulz said.

No one knows how many Key Largo woodrats remain, though Schulz guesses there are 200 at the most. A researcher from St. Andrews University in Scotland is doing a high-tech census. And a captive population also exists at the Tampa Zoo. This spring, the first captive-born woodrats from Disney or Tampa might be released into the wild, Schulz said.

"Right now I think it [the species] is holding its own," she said. "But you know; we just need to see what is happening with the python."