Small-Star League

Small animals can be incredible exhibit animals and some of them can be very popular with the public.  There's one ceiling they seem to have never cracked, as far as I can tell, and that's true celebrity status.  By that I don't mean small species which visitors come to the zoo to see - I mean individual animals that people come to see.

Cincinnati Zoo, of course, has Fiona the hippo.  There was Willie B. the gorilla at Zoo Atlanta, Packy the elephant at Oregon Zoo, Colo the gorilla at Columbus Zoo, giant pandas in DC ... a line of famous zoo celebrities that stretches back, in this country, at least to Smokey at National Zoo, and back even further in the zoos of Europe (Jumbo the elephant, Zarafa the giraffe, Clara the rhinoceros, etc).  Gomek, the saltwater crocodile at St. Augustine Alligator Farm, was a rare non-mammal entry on the list, with his successor, Maximo, now bearing the title.

Some, such as Fiona, are world famous.  Others might not be as celebrated, but still have a devoted fan base.  There is an entire facebook page, for example, dedicated to photographs of Alba, the San Diego Zoo's female Andean bear.  As far as I can tell, no small animal has reached that level of fame.  The closest I can think of would be the koalas at San Diego, before that species became as prevalent in zoos as they are today.

A lot of the most popular smaller animals (which are really more midsize in the grand-scheme of things) are parts of social groups, so visitors come to see the group, not the individual - penguins, or meerkats, not THAT penguin or THAT lemur.  It also seems to be the rule that the animal must be of a species that the public is already familiar with - I haven't seen many cases of even larger lesser-known animals achieving rockstar status at their facility

Though I will say, for a while there was one almost-exception.  I was surprised to see many facebook posts about, of all things, a short-eared elephant shrew named Cranberry at Zoo Knoxville, who was something of a social media hit and even had some branded merchandise out there.  Unfortunately, elephant shrews don't live all that long, which did put a damper on Cranberry's following.   Perhaps with enough time and social media savvy, Cranberry too could have become a star.