Now I've Seen It All?

Sometimes, when I'm chatting with keeper friends, we talk about the animals that we haven't seen yet and wish that we could, either in a zoo or in the wild.  The list is mostly made up of rare, obscure animals, like proboscis monkeys, leopard seals, saola, Philippine eagles, hoatzin, and kakapo.  Some of these are animals that used to be in zoos - sometimes even zoos that we work at or used to work at - and we look at old pictures.  I wonder if the keepers back then knew how lucky they were to work with such incredible animals.

There are very rarely any reptiles on the list.  That's because we've seen almost all of them.

Ok, not *all* of them.  Not even most of them.  Zoo reptile collections can actually be a little repetitive, with the same animals in a lot of zoos.  There are a lot of reptiles which are very poorly known, sometimes only from a museum specimen or two that maybe was collected back when Darwin was in his teenage years or something.  Still, there are very, very few of what I would call "recognizable" reptiles - those being the ones that at least 1% of the population has actually heard of - which can't be found in zoos.

I've seen about half of the world's cat species and maybe a third of the world's dogs... but I've seen all of the crocodilians in a single day, at St. Augustine Alligator Farm.  That's kind of an extreme example, but I have seen most of the world's sea turtles, tortoises, monitor lizards, and so on.  Part of it is that reptiles tend to be smaller and less active than mammals and so, maybe justly, maybe not, aren't given huge exhibits.  A reptile house might have the same footprint as a single mammal exhibit at a zoo, but house more species than all the mammals put together.  Part of it is that, unlike mammals, reptiles are backed up by an enormous private pet/collector trade, which makes it a lot easier for a zoo to place an order for a rare specimen, regardless if other zoos have it.

Sitting back and thinking about it, I'd say that the most famous living reptile that I've never seen would be... the leatherback sea turtle.  A gigantic, totally marine reptile, with a specialized diet of jellyfish, with extensive legal protections and very little history of being kept in zoos or aquariums.  After that... I feel like you'd have to go a long, long way down the list before you find the next animal.  Whatever it is, it's probably pretty darn obscure, even by my standards.

I don't expect to ever see a leatherback in an aquarium, unless there's one that is found to be non-releasable and somehow adjusts well to life in an aquarium.  If that does happen, I'm making a pilgrimage.  Otherwise, it might be best to just plan a vacation to a beach where they nest, the only time they come ashore after entering the ocean as hatchlings.

Just because they aren't famous, though, doesn't mean I don't always get excited when I see something new for the first time.  When I visited the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, I loved seeing all of the small, secretive little snakes and lizards that were local to the area and I'd never seen elsewhere.  Each one that I saw that was new to me felt like a new discovery.