It was in those days that I contemplated making business
cards with a new title of my own creation – “Curator of Crickets.”
There were thousands of crickets, with thousands coming in
every week. They were sorted by size in
various bins, divided for our feeding convenience. There were the tiniest of “pinheads”, meant
for feeding mantellas and dart frogs.
There were the one-inch giants, suitable prey for the frilled lizards,
galliwasps, and other medium-sized lizards.
Tucked away among the later were the plastic shoeboxes of soil, where we
hoped to induce the crickets to breed, providing us with more young crickets to
feed out (we were rarely successful – flies seemed to always infest and ruin
these nest boxes).
Caring for crickets wasn’t glamorous, but it was essential
to the well being of the collection, and I learned a lot of practical knowledge
in those days. How to unpack a cardboard
box containing hundreds of crickets without them all escaping as soon as you
lift the flap. How to keep the colony
clean – scraping all of the crickets into a huge pile, then placing food on the
opposite end of the tank. The live
crickets would rush to claim it, leaving their droppings, their leftover food,
and their dead behind in an easily cleaned pile. Of greatest importance was learning to feed
the crickets properly so that they themselves would become more nutritious food
for our own animals, a process called “gut-loading”.
Nor were the crickets the only animals in the room that I
was responsible for. There were
mealworms and their giant cousins, the superworms. There were hissing cockroaches (spares from
the insect keepers), a tank of minnows, and jars of fruit flies, crawling above
the blue agar. Recently, a tank of apple
snails had been added, but these were reserved for the caiman lizards that were
our curator’s pride and joy.
And then there were the rodents.
Rats and mice were sorted in bins, much like the
crickets. The biggest were the giant
rats, the size of a kitten. The smallest
were the pinkies, little naked balls of meat for our smallest snakes. (Rabbits, guinea pigs, and once even a
suckling pig graced our kitchen also, but they arrived deceased, and so
required no care on my part). While
mammal prey was very rarely fed live (and then usually only to tempt a very
picky eater, and then under the strictest supervision from the keeping staff),
it was deemed preferable to acquire the rodents alive and fresh, dispatching
them immediately prior to feeding them out.
Reptiles are a pretty low maintenance lot, provided heat and
lightning and water quality are where you want them to be. They eat far less than mammals of the same
size; as a result, they poop less and require less clean-up. The rats and mice, crickets and fruit flies,
on the other hand, seemed to require endless cleanings, feedings, and
fine-tunings. It wouldn’t be an
exaggeration to say that, even after I graduated to care of the actual
collection animals, I still spent more time on that little white room than I
did the rest of the animals in our sprawling building.
When you tell people that you are a zookeeper, they tend to
get excited (or at least curious) and ask questions about it. They tend to lose interest when you tell them
that most of the animals you “keep” are insects and rodents (and snails!) meant
to be fed to other animals. While caring
for feeder animals may not be the most glamorous or exciting of zoo jobs, it is
still essential to providing for the care and well being of the animals in the
collection.
It’s an important job, even if no one gives you a business
card or fancy job title for doing it.
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