BALTIMORE -- Inside a hallway of the veterinary hospital at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, a popular new program plays 24/7 on a computer screen.

They call it “Woodrat TV,” said Erin Grimm, the zoo’s mammal curator.

On camera is a singularly important Allegheny woodrat, whose job it is to help repopulate her species, which is threatened by encroachment from human development. She is the first participant in a captive breeding program at the zoo to save the woodrat, a big-eared relative of the pack rat that’s about the length of a bowling pin (if you include the woodrat’s furry tail).

When she arrived at the zoo from her habitat in Pennsylvania, Allegheny Woodrat 9891, as she is known, was already pregnant. Within weeks, she gave birth to three healthy pups: Must See TV on the Woodrat Channel.

Woodrats are solitary critters who live in remote, rocky outcroppings dotting the Appalachians from Pennsylvania to Georgia, hidden from all but the most determined seekers. Several biologists have watched the zoo’s footage eagerly, Grimm said, having never seen a woodrat give birth before, despite years of studying and tracking them.

“They are secretive and live in tiny cracks and crevices in the rocks,” Grimm said. “It’s nice for us to be able to capture this.”

But, for the zoo’s program, that’s just a cherry on top. The real goal lies with those three rapidly growing woodrats, who will be released into the wild in Pennsylvania and Indiana. The juvenile woodrats will offer something desperately needed in their new homes: genetic diversity.

Underlying the woodrats’ precipitous decline is, unsurprisingly, human development. The construction of homes, buildings and roads has isolated individual populations of woodrats, destroying the forested lands through which they traveled to breed with one another.

Scientists call it the “extinction vortex,” said Jacqueline Doyle, a Towson University associate professor who studies the genetics of woodrat populations. As animals are assailed by habitat loss, pollution, hunting or invasive species, their populations shrink and fragment — and so does the gene pool. Inbreeding and the loss of genetic diversity make entire populations less adaptable to disease and environmental change, and can send species into a tailspin.

“Even if you address the initial problem that resulted in the population decreasing in size — even if you combat habitat loss or you combat an exotic species — if you’ve lost that genetic variation, it can still be very difficult for the population to recover,” Doyle said.

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