Researcher

I've often felt that in recent years, as zoos have emphasized the educational and inspirational aspects of their missions, they've left behind one of their earliest goals - research.  Many of the oldest zoos in Europe were founded as scientific establishments devoted to research; for the first few years of its existence, the London Zoo wasn't even open to the public, only to the fellows of the Zoological Society.  

"Research" can cover a broad variety of topics - I generally would define it as the process of obtaining information that is new and currently unknown.  This separates it from education, which is the sharing of known information with an audience.  It can encompass everything from vivisection and other highly invasive practices (which is what most people think of when they first hear the word, and might explain why zoos de-emphasize research) to behavioral studies.   I'd go so far as to say that much of, if not most of, the research being done in zoos is behavioral in nature.  This is the purview of the behaviorist positions that many zoos have added in recent years.

Other research can focus on other topics - physiology, nutrition, or reproduction, for example.  Again looking back at the earliest zoos, next to nothing was known about many of the animals back then, and there were constant opportunities to learn from the specimens, both in life and (especially) after death during dissections.  As it happens, there's still a lot that we don't know about many taxa.  Part of it comes down to the small sample sizes that we've been looking at.  Part of it is because we haven't been asking enough questions - or even know what questions to ask.  One zoo recently documented parthenogenesis - virgin birth - in an American crocodile, the first ever known occurrence of the phenomena in a crocodilian.  Or what about a few years ago, when it was discovered that Tasmanian devils were bioluminescent?  

Aquariums, which hold a variety of species seldom kept elsewhere due to their reliance on collection of fish and invertebrates from the wild, are often the centers of the most exciting discoveries - there are cases of animals being brought into aquariums which have never even been scientifically described or named.  Currently, only the larger facilities tend to have designated in-house research departments.  Zoos and aquariums of all sizes, however, can work cooperatively on research projects, polling their resources and data to help expand our knowledge of a wide variety of animals.