Beauty in Numbers

I've always loved zoos and aquariums, and I guess that I always will.  As I've gotten older (and slightly more financially comfortable), though, I've begun to indulge in an interest that it never really occurred to me that I might explore in my younger, broker days.  I've begun to take more trips with the planned purpose of seeing animals in the wild.  Yes, I still slip in a zoo or two or three on these trips, but I'm spending a lot more time with binoculars in hand out in the field these days as well.

A while back, I went whale watching off the coast of California.  We hadn't even left the harbor yet when I saw California sea lions - mountains of them, heaped on top of one another in loud, squabbling, smelly piles.   Not long after we reached more open water, I saw dolphins.  Now, I'd seen wild dolphins from the beach before - always a tiny little pod off on the horizon.  This was different - there were hundreds.  I had a hard time even focusing on them.  I'd be watching one and trying to stay with it as it went up and down, over and under the surface, only to be distracted by another, and then another.  

I've seen plenty of California sea lions before in zoos and aquariums, whether engaged in training demonstrations with their keepers or cruising past underwater viewing windows.  This particular species of dolphin (Risso's dolphin) was new to me, but I've seen bottlenose and white-sided dolphins in a handful of aquariums.  What made this viewing experience so special to me wasn't so much the wildness (though the unexpectedness of the encounters and the vastness of the horizons was doubtlessly a factor).

I think it was the numbers.

There's something incredible about seeing animals in such large groups.  I'm so used to seeing maybe half a dozen members of a species in a group in a zoo, when in the wild those groups might be enormous.  A "troop" of mandrills at a zoo might consist of a male, three or so females, and their young.  In the wild, there might be hundreds, the largest congregations of nonhuman primates on earth.  The thought of stumbling into a clearing in the jungle and coming across that would be breathtaking... and maybe a little terrifying.  And that's to say nothing of the massive herds of ungulates that you can find (or historically would have found) on grasslands around the world.  Why don't zoos run big herds of bison, or zebra, or wildebeest?

There are reasons why a zoo might not opt to go with a completely "natural" social group.  Part of it may be a holdover from the days when zoos placed more focus on numbers of species.  If you have enough pasture for twenty ungulates, the old logic was that it made for sense to go with a pair each of ten species rather than one herd of twenty.  A visitor was more likely to be impressed by seeing a variety of animals rather than a lot of one species.  You've seen one impala, you've seen them all, am I right?

There is a more practical argument also to be made for smaller groups.  Zoos no longer regularly collect animals from the wild, which means that they have to breed their own stock, which in turn means that they need to maximize genetic diversity for long term sustainability.  In a big social group of mammals, however, there's usually only one dominant breeding male (birds being more prone to monogamy - you typically see bigger groups of flamingos and penguins in zoos, though granted, they are much smaller than bison).  That means that the offspring born from that herd are all likely to be half-siblings, which can impact the breeding program pretty severely down the road.  Now, if you have several smaller herds, and that single zebra stallion only has access to three or four mares, he doesn't have such as outsized impact on your gene pool.

Which makes sense, I suppose... but there are times that I think it might be worth it to be able to showcase a truly spectacular, large group of big animals, to devote half of your total exhibit space to one species and let them really have the numbers to wow people.  Not only would it be an impressive exhibit, but it would probably result in less hegemony among zoos - one zoo might have a big bison exhibit, another a big wildebeest, another a big zebra, rather than each having a smaller habitat for each.  This would make each zoo more of a draw, as it would be different from its neighbors.  Larger social groupings mean more social affiliative (and agonistic) behavior, providing a better educational experience for visitors.  They also could help staff build expertise with certain species.

But, yeah, mostly I just think of the show aspect - maybe a little glimpse of what the world looked like when it was a little wilder than it is today, and great herds or troops or pods of animals still defined the landscape with their movements.