Today, we'll continue our exploration of the California Academy of Sciences by visiting the second, and older, of it's animal attractions, the Steinhart Aquarium.
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Saturday, March 16, 2024
Zoo Review: California Academy of Sciences, Part II
Friday, March 15, 2024
Zoo Review: California Academy of Sciences, Part I
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Spring Breakers
It's perhaps the most hectic week of the year. On a rotating basis, that is.
Say what you will about summer crowds, they at least have three months to spread themselves out over. And sure, field trips may bring crazy numbers of kids, but they are - nominally - supervised. Spring break is, if you'll pardon me, an entirely different animal.
After the first week of summer, I feel like most of the crowds are a little settled. They've got weeks ahead to enjoy themselves are willing to pace themselves. There's kind of a desperate, almost forced, panicky sense of wildness in spring breaks. Like the crowds have to fit in as much excitement as they can before they go back to school. And if they can't find excitement at the zoo, sometimes they'll make their own. But what makes it especially rough is if you zoo happens to be located at the boundary of several large school districts. Then, you have to wonder if it's worse to have two or three weeks of back-to-back-to-back spring breaks, or, in some cases, have them all coincide on one crazy week.
The hardest part of spring break, however is that, because it's still part of the school year, we're often still a little short. We don't have our seasonal keepers, our interns, our volunteers - many of them will be unable to start yet. So we face the crowds, but we largely face them alone and understaffed.
Right after the relative calm of winter, it can be an especially jarring transition. It's almost enough to make you wish summer would just hurry up and get it over with.
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Book Review: Chasing Giants - In Search of the World's Largest Freshwater Fish
There have been plenty of times when I've been excited to read a book, only to find myself disappointed by it. Far less frequent are occurrences when I pick up a book, not expecting much from it, and actually end up enjoying it. Such was the case with Zeb Hogan's Chasing Giants: In Search of the World's Largest Freshwater Fish. Just glancing at it, I thought it was going to be simply a collection of sensationalized fishing stories about monster fish. Still, I'd been interested in learning more about freshwater giants ever since my visit to the Tennessee Aquarium, so I decided to give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised.
Dr. Hogan is research biologist from the University of Nevada, which seems like a funny place to be from when your life passion is giant freshwater fish. He frames his book around a very simple conundrum, inspired by a news story of a big catch that caught his eye. We know what the largest animal (blue whale), land mammal (African elephant), bird (ostrich), fish (whale shark), and so on are. Why do we not know what the world's largest freshwater fish is? A freshwater fish, in this case, is defined as one that spends its entire life in freshwater habitats, as opposed to one which may live in saltwater and occasionally venture into brackish water.
The resultant quest takes him around the globe, often as part of a National Geographic film crew (Dr. Hogan hosts the popular National Geographic series Monster Fish). A decent part of the book takes place in the Amazon, which will surprise absolutely zero people who spend any time in public aquariums - arapaima, arowana, pacu, and other South American river giants are extremely popular in zoo and aquarium collections, and, possibly (but not certainly) excluding native habitats, Amazon River displays are the most common geographic display of freshwater fish to be seen. And those chapters are nice enough. What I really enjoyed - and what I'd hoped to get out of the book - were the parts that dove into (pun intended) other freshwater systems that are less-commonly discussed.
Hogan takes the reader to the rivers of Western Europe, where wels catfish are one of the few giant freshwater species to expand their ranges, American bayous prowled by alligator gars, the steppes of Mongolia, home to giant salmon, and to the Australian Outback, where freshwater sawfish join crocodiles and sharks in the rivers. For each of these species, the author explains not only the natural history of the species, but how it has related to humans throughout history and how it fares in the modern world. Much of the book, however, focuses on the rivers of Southeast Asia and it is there that Dr. Hogan finds his true giant (the identity of which we'll keep secret here.)
Did the author document the world's largest freshwater fish? Maybe. It may very well be that, just downstream, there was a slightly larger fish of a different species. And maybe a slightly larger fish somewhere else in the planet. Who knows. I would say that the important thing isn't so much finding and tagging one fish of one species and putting a "World's Biggest" ribbon in it. Instead, the book (and the accompanying TV series, which I have yet to watch) can help call attention to an entire group of megafauna that most of us never even consider. Many of these giant fish are in serious danger of disappearing, whether through overharvesting, pollution, or habitat loss. At least one species that Dr. Hogan searches for - the Chinese paddlefish, spear-nosed cousin to our American paddlefish - is already likely extinct. Without conservation efforts, more are likely to follow.
There are indeed monsters in the rivers that this book takes us to. But they don't have fins or scales. They have two legs.
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Saturday, March 9, 2024
Close Encounters of the Gorilla Kind
This incident actually happened last year, but it seems to have gone viral now, so I guess we'll share it now! In a potentially disastrous event, two keepers at the Fort Worth Zoo were out prepping the gorilla yard, when their adult male gorilla, Elmo, turned out to still be in the enclosure. Fortunately, the keepers both were able to make a break for it and get out unharmed, while Elmo was preoccupied with food. The event happened while the zoo was open and was filmed by visitors, who were heard commenting as it played out. Their video footage can be found here.
I've been a similar situation years ago (a bear, not a gorilla... but not sure if that's better or worse), so I can imagine how scared those keepers must have been. I likewise had a newer keeper let a clouded leopard in on me by mistake (I'm being charitable in assuming it was a mistake). It's good that the keepers were able to stay as calm as you can be when dashing for your life and took advantage of their chance to get out.Keeper error always sounds like such a judgy term, but the fact is that 99% of all potentially dangerous incidents in which keepers and animals come into contact are caused by mistakes on the part of the former. Thankfully everyone here is safe and well, and hopefully it was a learning experience for everyone. Except maybe Elmo. He seems to know what's going on.
Thursday, March 7, 2024
The Blameless Ones
As the likely vector of the deadly chytrid fungus, which has imperiled amphibian populations around the globe, you'd be hard pressed to think of an amphibian which has wrought more destruction upon the natural world than the African clawed frog. Of course, there is its fellow invasive amphibian, the American bullfrog, which has spread across the globe devouring smaller creatures in its wake. Oh, and the Cane toad, equally invasive, but with the added disadvantage of being very toxic.
For a class of animals that is generally considered to be highly endangered, some amphibians, it seems, are doing pretty well for themselves...
Efforts to control cane toads, for example (and let's not shy away from it, control = killing) are generally fairly uncontroversial. Same for invasive insects. Or snakes, such as the brown tree snakes of Guam, or the Burmese pythons in the Everglades. But what about when that invasive threat is cute and cuddly... and perhaps answers to the name of Mittens?
Feral and free-roaming domestic cats are an ecological plague on bird, reptile, and small mammal populations around the globe, having been implicated in many extinctions. But when you tell many people that, they insist it isn't the cats' fault. Either they excuse the behavior entirely as "natural" (never mind that domestic cats aren't "naturally" found in the Americas, or New Zealand, or Australia, or...), or they agree it's a problem, but wrong to take action against the cats, because it's humans who are the real destructive species.
Well... duh. I mean, it's not like the cats, or African clawed frogs, or brown tree snakes, built and manned ships that sailed the globe and invaded other ecosystems. They were brought there and released, intentionally or otherwise, by humans. They are OUR problem... which does still make them a problem. If anything, it makes control of their populations outside of their range that much more our responsibility.
An African clawed frog that hatches out of an egg in California doesn't know it's any different from one that hatches out in southern Africa. Both are just trying to survive, which means doing as at the expense of other creatures which are their prey, and, in the case of the California ones, potentially spreading diseases as well. It's not the clawed frogs "fault" that their an endangered species. I don't hold it against them, I don't want to suffer to "pay" for it, it's not a moral judgement.
I just don't want any of them to live either a) outside of their native range, or b) if outside of their native range, in a carefully controlled environment, such as a zoo, where they are unable to impact native wildlife. It stinks if you happen to be that frog or snake or cat that's collateral damage, caught up in an ecological crisis that you did not - knowingly - contribute to or cause. But that's our responsibility for cleaning up our environmental messes.