Satire: De-Wokifying the National Zoo

 

Species Fact Profile: Eastern Lubber Grasshopper (Romalea microptera)

Eastern Lubber Grasshopper

                                           Romalea microptera (Palisot de Beauvois, 1817)

Range: Southeastern and Central United States

Habitat: Open Woodlands, Fields

Diet: Herbs, Shrubs , and Grasses

Social Grouping: Large cohorts upon hatching, less social as they age

Reproduction: Breeds in the summer.  Females lays about up to three clutches of 50 eggs in a burrow in the soil, which overwinter and hatch in the spring.  Undergo five molt periods (instars), each about 20 days long before becoming adults

Lifespan: 1 Year

      Conservation Status: IUCN Not Evaluated

• Largest grasshoppers in the United States (alongside western lubber, Taeniopoda eques).  Adults generally 4-7 centimeters long, but can reach up to 9 centimeters.  Females are larger than males.  Wings are fairly small, about half the length of the abdomen, and cannot be used in flight
• Coloration and patterning varies across range, with some individuals yellow or orange, others primarily black; some are intermediate, yellow with black banding.  Bright red color on the back beneath the wings, which can be flared to become more prominent
• Bright coloration warns predators of unpleasant taste.  Can also emit a foul, foamy secretion to deter predators (which can be sprayed up to 15 centimeters), as well as make a loud hiss to frighten enemies.  One predator is the loggerhead shrike, which impales lubbers on thorns or fences and leaves them there for a day or two, allowing the toxin to degrade
• While adults are less social than nymphs, they will still often aggregate into groups in the evening, possibly as a form of protection from predators
• "Lubber" means a slow, clumsy, or lazy person, likely bestowed upon this species because of its slow movements (not especially good at hopping, usually seen walking - but can be decent climbers).  Species name from the Greek for "Small Wing"
• Pose some threat as an agricultural nuisance when present in sufficient numbers, will feed on a variety of crops.  Control often consists of manual removal, as these grasshoppers are resistant to many pesticides, both due to their large size and their ability to detoxify natural toxins

The Balance Beam

I never wanted to think of zoos and aquariums are political entities, but on some level it's inevitable.  Political issues closely impact not only zoos and aquariums themselves (USDA inspections, regulations on the acquisition/transport of animals, government-owned species, etc), but on topics central to our core mission, such as conservation and education.  Still, I never suspected that the country would become so politicized that everything would start to be seen through the lens of right and left, red and blue, authoritarian or "woke."

I see a long, difficult walk ahead of us on a narrow balance beam, high off the ground.

On one side, we lean heavily into messaging that pushes for advocacy and change.  We continue to loudly and vocally express support for conservation initiatives, including calling out government and industry practices that harm species and their environments - as Monterey Bay Aquarium was willing to do over lobster-trapping, and now faces a lawsuit.  We advocate for continued reintroduction programs and habitat restorations, working with such government agencies as will still participate in these projects (I suspect more at a state level for the next four years).  We are open and honest about our history.  We continue to try to make our own campuses sustainable, and encourage visitors to do the same.  We continue to recruit, employ, and celebrate a diverse workforce, and strive to make our facilities open and accessible to all.

This is the position I favor - though I acknowledge that it carries the risk of angering powerful people if pushed too far.  Suppose, say, a zoo were to build an exhibit complex themed on the US-Mexican borderlands, with a giant, ugly wall running through some of the habitats that illustrated how such a construction would negatively impact ocelots, desert bighorn sheep, pronghorns, and other species.  It would be a bold, powerful statement.  It might also result in boycotts, funding pulled, and, the way things are going with this admin, legal harassment.

On the other side, we keep our heads down, just focus on exhibiting and breeding animals (for exhibit purposes) for the next few years.  We offer ourselves up as a fun, relaxing, and, above all, apolitical oasis for the next few years, a place where visitors can think about tigers instead of tariffs, rhinos instead of racism.  Scrub our signage of anything "political."  End our DEAI programs.  Some of our shadier colleagues would doubtlessly benefit from the reduced focus on regulation; I wouldn't be shocked if we saw less of USDA inspectors over the next few years.  Maybe more animals get kicked off the Endangered Species list, making it easier to do what they will with them without permits.  Maybe importing animals from the wild becomes a lot easier.  Heck, some people may be tempted to cozy up to the new admin with flattery and signs of fealty ("Presenting the President Donald J. Trump Lion House!") to curry favor.

Leaning this way takes us from our core mission, and turns us back to what our critics always said we were - animals in boxes, assembled for the amusement of the public.  We become the "circus" part of "bread and circuses."  When this political scenario is finally played out, we may be relatively unscathed - but we'll be remembered as cowards.  As magnificent as the facility was (well, before the bombs fell), people tend to remember the Berlin Zoo of the Third Reich in a certain, less-flattering way.

I know which direction I want to lean into... but I guess we'll all have to make our own choices.

Of Museums and Messages

 Trump executive order seeks to 'restore' American history through Smithsonian overhaul

I very much look forward to a day when I don't have to report so much on the White House on this blog, and yet, here we are...

Most folks reading this article are - quite naturally - focusing on the impact that this is going to have on the museums that teach American history - specifically, the National Museum of American History, National Museum of the American Indian, and National Museum of African American History and Culture.  But don't sleep on how this could impact the National Museum of Natural History... as well as the National Zoo.

Sure, the National Zoo doesn't seem like it has much to do with American history - but it still conveys educational messages that some in the administration would doubtlessly call "woke," perhaps even "anti-American" (in the very peculiar way that they define that).  What about signage about the restoration of American endangered species, such as red wolves and American bison (in some cases, including the stories of how those species were driven almost to extinction in the first place)?  Or messaging about coal mining and its impact on endangered species, such as in the Appalachian salamander display in the Reptile Discovery Center?  Heaven forbid climate change gets brought up.

How will this also impact messaging impact the sharing of stories about different cultures and how they relate to animals?  I can't help but think of the story of the Ganesha statue at the Tulsa Zoo, and how some local conservatives were infuriated that it "promoted" Hinduism to visitors.

Years ago, I remember seeing a video about a crazy conservative firebrand who took it upon herself to "audit" the Field Museum and the Brookfield Zoo, looking for liberal ("woke" wasn't in their vocabulary back then) messaging.  It's like that lady was just made Secretary of the Smithsonian.

I don't see zoos and museums bowing under too easily.  Instead, there may be opportunities to rewrap the messages in ways that slide past the censors, perhaps avoiding the buzzwords that seem to trigger them so (many of them seem to be intellectually lazy, if not stupid, and are probably just skimming more than reading and understanding).  I feel like the next few years are going to be a constant attempt to resist where we can, endure when we must.

To Go? Or Not To Go?

 Reading The Captive Sea has put me in somewhat of a philosophical bind.  I consider myself to be something of an amateur scholar about zoos, including the study of their history and evolution.  To that end, the Miami Seaquarium is one of the most fascinating facilities out there, and reading the book about its founding has left me with a desire to see the grounds, see how it compares to what Craig Phillips described, maybe even recognize some of the iconic structures.  

On the other hand, the owners of the Seaquarium, The Dolphin Company (original name) have been in the news a lot lately amid accusations of poor husbandry, including the deaths of animals.  I've made it a point in recent years to try and avoid zoos and aquariums that don't meet high standards of animal care.  Any and all AZA accredited facilities I'll green-light, and the non-accredited members I take on a case by case basis (just today, for example, I learned that El Paso Zoo lost accreditation, but not for any reasons relating to animal care, which was noted as being of high quality.  I expect them to regain accreditation, but if I have an opportunity to visit them before they regain it, I would do so with no qualms).  There are a handful of rare or unusual animals that I could see, but I have not because I don't want to support a place.

Gulf World Marine Park faces backlash amid dolphin deaths

I'd like to think that things will turn around for the Seaquarium, but they do seem to be in a bit of a downward spiral.  I might see if I can use any professional contact to get in and take a look.  As for paying and supporting the place, though?  That I might need to give a good long think about... and depending on what I read, and see, and hear from other folks, maybe it just isn't meant to be.

And What Do We Have Here? (No, Seriously, I Have No Idea...)

Reading The Captive Sea, I expected to be the most intrigued by stories about sharks and manatees and other big ocean animals - and those stories were, to be fair, pretty cool.  I think what I actually found the most intriguing, though, were the stories about the small fish and invertebrates that curator Craig Phillips and his divers collected.  Not only did I have no idea what they were, but in some cases neither did the marine biologists.

Today, the vast majority of our animals are born and bred in zoos and aquariums, though some are also obtained from private breeders and dealers.  Most of the wild-born animals that we take in are rescues and tend to be native species, in which case we generally know quite well what they are.  But back in the day when the majority of animals (almost all of them, in the case of aquariums and oceanariums) came from the wild, and via large collecting trips, rather than targeted acquisition, it was not uncommon for facilities to wind up with animals that they had no name for.  Sometimes, the species was one already known to science, but maybe only rarely, or as a museum specimen in a jar, not a live animal.  In other cases, the animal was completely unknown.

On one hand, having a "brand new" species offer tremendous scientific opportunities for a zoo or aquarium.  Every point of data that you can collect - a weight to add to a growth curve, a behavior to add to an ethogram - that's new to science.  That's data that you can't get from a dead specimen.

On the other hand, that brand new species very well might end up as a dead specimen sooner than you expect.  If you don't even know what an animal is called, you probably don't know too much about its needs, and that can make it very difficult to provide the care that the animal needs to thrive.  In some cases you can probably make a very educated guess, especially if the species has very close relatives which you are familiar with - if a new species of, say, piranha were discovered in the Amazon, for instance, we'd probably be able to offer a decent approximation of the correct husbandry using what we know about other piranha species.  But what if it is something completely new and unknown?

One of my favorite animal books ever is The Overloaded Ark by Gerald Durrell, which details the author's first collecting expedition to Cameroon.  Besides the expected monkeys and crocodiles and porcupines, Durrell encountered and collected several species that hadn't been kept before, such as the lemur-like angwantibo and the bizarre giant otter shrew (Not an otter.  Not a shrew).  In some cases he was able to deduce the correct care and bring the animal back to England successfully.  In other cases, he failed.  Failure is a natural and inevitable component of experimentation.  But experimentation can be much harder to justify when you're dealing in the lives of animals.

Book Review: The Captive Sea - Life Behind the Scenes of the Great Modern Oceanariums

Perhaps the most infamous facility in America has, for some years, been the Miami Seaquarium.  Sure, the SeaWorld parks draw their share of criticism, being the best-known of the marine parks, but their established and well-respected animal rescue program has also generated an equally-large body of supporters.  Miami, in contrast, seems to have been a facility that has come to symbolize the anachronisms of our old system of keeping marine life, especially its most famous resident, Lolita (Tokitae) the orca.  Lolita was a flashpoint of controversy with activists, and came to be the animal that essentially defined the park.  When she passed in 2023, it seemed like that might be the end of the Seaquarium

That said, almost two years after the orca's death, the Seaquarium still stands (albeit with a reduced collection).  Nor did the facility begin with an orca.  Nor did it have a cloud over its name for much of its history.  For the fascinating story of how this place came to be, I recommend The Captive Sea.

In the 1950's, marine biologist Craig Phillips was tasked with transforming mud and mangroves on the edge of Biscayne Bay into a world-class aquarium.  The book is the saga of building the campus, devising methods of caring for the animals, collecting them, and managing them.  As the title would suggest, this is a book of its times (many zoo and aquariums folks shy away from use of the C word these days), and some of the chapters may be upsetting for readers these days, such as the collection of dolphins from the wild (though it's interesting to see how in Phillips' era, it seemed completely uncontroversial; the only pushback he seems to have received was from a town in South Carolina that was worried that the capture of a local white dolphin would deprive them of a tourist draw).  A casual mention made of planned inbreeding also startled me a little, before I remembered that this was written before the effects of inbreeding were really established.

Phillips describes experiences working with a wide variety of marine life, from jellies to octopi to sharks to manatees.  I find it a fascinating read because it goes back to an era of animal-keeping when so much less was known, especially aquatic animals, and there was so much to learn, a more curious, scientific era of experimentation.  Of course, the flipside of that is that not all experiments are successful, and in cases like these, you're dealing with living things, so failure has consequences of life and death.  Even I, who know fairly little about marine animal management, saw a few passages and thought to myself, "Well that's not going to work out very well..." only for the author to discover the same thing on the next page.  I was particularly thinking of that when I was reading Phillip's descriptions of working with leatherbacks, the largest of the sea turtles and the one species generally not kept in aquariums.  Phillips actual had better success with this species than I thought he would, but it still seems like a species that, at least until there's some major breakthrough, is not meant to be.

One species conspicuously absent from Phillips' memoir is the orca.  Well, not entirely absent - he mentions the species and describes it, doing so in a manner that suggests that most readers of his era would have been very unfamiliar with the species.  He then simply says that it's never been kept in captivity, but that it would doubtlessly be a big sensation if it ever were.  Well, he wasn't wrong about that, I suppose.

If you're reading The Captive Sea hoping for insights in how modern facilities care for marine life, you're probably going to walk away disappointed - much has changed in the field since the 1950s (as one would hope).  It does, however, make a fascinating read (ok, some of the parts about salinity and filtration I skimmed a bit, but the rest was great!) about the history of one of the most ambitious zoological projects ever attempted- recreating ocean ecosystems on dry land.

The Captive Sea: Life Behind the Scenes of the Great Modern Oceanariums, at GoodReads