Aesop, You Aren't

Since ancient times, people have used animals as allegory to tell stories and share morals.  When it's ancient lore being passed down - think "The Tortoise and the Hare," it comes across as charming, timeless, and insightful.  For some reason when people write crud like this in modern times, I just find it extremely annoying, like a whiny plea for people to recognizing how "deep" the author really is, and then we're all expected to clap at the end of story (I mean, who actually talks like this?).  I wonder if folks thousands of years ago felt that way about Aesop.

Also, don't throw rocks at the animals.  A better ending would be, "And then a zookeeper came up behind them and tipped both of them into the lion exhibit.  By the time the gun team arrived, it was obvious that it was too late to save them, so no actions were taken against the animals.  Thirty witnesses were on hand to say that the wife had pushed the husband in, and he pulled her in after him.  Case closed."

Archetypal Animals

 "I hope that you're the one - if not, you are the prototype."

- OutKast

Visitors go to the zoo to see animals, but with a few specific exceptions, they aren't too particular about what exact animals they see.  For example, you might ask someone what animal they're more keen to see, and they might say "monkeys."  They probably don't care too much about what monkeys they see, whether they're spider monkeys or macaques or guenons.  There are some animals that, while being monkeys, might not be "monkey enough" for the visitor, such as night monkeys or marmosets.  Similarly, they want to see parrots, but for the most part don't care as long as they are "parrot enough" - the key requirements being loud and colorful.

A trend that I've noticed in a lot of zoos is that you get zoo directors and presidents with less direct experience with animals, who are mostly brought in to run the business and drive the gate.  These are the folks who are often making decisions about collection planning and new exhibits, and that includes selecting animals.  They want animals to satisfy the visitors, and look for species that fill the niches that visitors are looking to see.  The thing is, for all of these niches of animal, there's inevitably one or two species which become the most popular by virtual of their visitor appeal (color, strange appearance), ease of care (cold hardiness, simple diet, compatibility with other species), or some other reason.

The result is that many zoos start holding those same few species, resulting in diminished diversity in species across zoos.

Visitors love crocodilians, for example.  Almost every zoo I've ever been to has a crocodile or alligator.  Of all of the world's crocodilians, there's none which probably makes a better exhibit animal than the American alligator.  They grow big, making an impressive animal.  They are tractable and ease to work around.  They are one of the most cold-hardy crocodilians, able to be outside for a great part of the year than tropical species.  Everyone's heard of them; they're cultural icons to a degree few other reptiles are.  Also, they're native to much of the US, and as such work in displays of native wildlife.  It's no surprise that so many zoos favor them.  If a zoo director wanted a crocodilian for display, why pick an small, obscure, delicate, or otherwise more difficult species, like a Philippine crocodile, when you could have an American alligator and the visitors would be just as happy? 

The more zoos work with that one (or handful of) species, the more set their husbandry become, and the more established it becomes in everyone's mind that this is the easier animal to work with, everything else starts to seem more difficult by comparison, and more zoos opt to work with those common species,

The scenario, or similar ones, plays out for penguins (African penguin), lemurs (ring-tailed lemur), waterfowl (mandarin duck, white-faced whistling duck), antelope (bongo, addra gazelle), and a host of other taxa.  The result is zoos that start to look a lot like one another - which maybe visitors don't mind too much.  The end result, however, is that we can support fewer species and have fewer assurance colonies of endangered or threatened species in our care.  

Some zoos, I feel, just need to start being willing to be a little more risk-averse and open to working with species that other zoos aren't working with and to do and be husbandry leaders, not just followers.

From the News: The San Francisco Zoo will receive a pair of pandas from China

The San Francisco Zoo will receive a pair of pandas from China

When China announced that new giant pandas would be coming to the US soon, it set off a flurry of speculation as to which zoos might be the beneficiaries.  San Diego Zoo was an obvious front runner, and I don't think anyone is expecting the National Zoo not to resume its work with the species.  But who else might join the panda program?  

I can honestly say, I was not expecting the answer to be San Francisco.

Despite being such a major US city, San Francisco has, for as long as I can remember, been a zoo that's squarely in the middle of the pack.  It's not famous for its exhibits or its collections in the way that many zoos in less prominent cities (Omaha, Columbus, Fort Worth) are.  There's been more than a little criticism of the zoo's governance in the press lately, and it's perhaps most famous for the fatal tiger attack (the only case of a zoo visitor being killed by an escaped animal at an AZA zoo that I've ever heard of), pushing 20 years ago.  

On the other hand... why not San Francisco?

The city has a long, storied history of association with China and Chinese culture.  The climate is favorable to notoriously heat-averse pandas (Mark Twain famously said that the coldest winter he'd ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco).  And maybe the bears will give the zoo the rejuvenating energy to launch itself to a new era.

It's funny, but I've been to San Francisco twice, and still haven't made it to the zoo, though not for lack of interest.  Perhaps when I swing back next time, I'll make it over there and see giant pandas in my fifth US zoo.

Extinction in Black, White, and Pink

The photo below was taken by David Seth-Smith in 1926.  It's a shame that it's in black-and-white, because I imagine the scene was quite vivid in color.  The birds pictured are pink-headed ducks, a species of waterfowl found in South Asia.  Note the use of the past tense.  Though the IUCN still technically lists the species as Critically Endangered, in truth they have not been seen for decades (since 1949, to be exact), and are almost certainly extinct.

Like the quagga, thylacine, and Carolina parakeet, as well as the famous passenger pigeon, this species survived long enough to be housed in modern zoo collections.  I wonder if the duck had been able to hold on just a little longer, if just a few more birds had made their way into zoos; considering the era, actually, private waterfowl collections, such as the UK's WWT or the US's Sylvan Heights, may have been a better bet.  If enough birds had been kept with serious efforts to breed them, maybe the species could have been saved.  The odds would have been stacked against it, but other endangered species have bounced back from equally dire odds.

Again, the pink-headed duck technically still is an endangered species, not an extinct one, though a formal change in status seems to be only a matter of time.  As another Earth Day passes us by, we can look back at our questionable, rather mixed record in saving endangered species, and try to promise ourselves - and our descendants - that we'll do better to save the next one.  And the one after.

That's OrangUTAN to You!

We're all busy people in the zoo field, and we can't be expected to waste a lot of time of idle chit chat (I type as I listen to many of my coworkers who are, indeed, engaged in idle chitchat at the moment).  We need to keep conversations moving, as as such we need to be brief.  As a community, our lingo is full of acronyms, from AZA to ZAHP, some of which can overlap confusingly with more conventional uses of those same acronyms (a BFF is a black-footed ferret, not your best friend forever, though I suppose they could be the same, while a PDF refers not to a type of file format, but to a poison dart frog).

We also use a lot of short-hand with animals, abbreviating either their Latin names or their common ones.  Many of these have seeped into common usage, which is why many of our guests will speak of chimps, not chimpanzees, rhinos, not rhinoceroses, and hippos, not hippopotamuses (hippopotami).  

But there is one commonly-used short-hand for a popular zoo animal which we should not be using.  Recently, I came across a statement from the Orangutan SSP (itself several years old, but I just saw it for the first time now) explaining why, for reasons of linguistic accuracy and respect for Malay culture, it is not appropriate to call orangutans by the common nickname of "orang."

Orang-u-slang: Why "orang" is no substitute for "orangutan," by Rachel Davis

One commenter on the original post replied with an eye-roll emoji and said "There are more important things to worry about, like deforestation and poaching."  Yes, that's true.  If I had to pick between a world where orangutans were thriving in the wild but called "orangs" and one in which they were extinct, but everyone used the proper term, I know which one I would choose in a heartbeat.  That being said, stopping poaching and habitat loss is going to be an expensive, difficult, years-long struggle... whereas all the SSP is asking you to do is tack on two syllables to the name.  C'mon...

PS: After reading this, I did make a point of going through the blog and changing every use of the word "orang" to "orangutan" - or at least every one that I could find.  If I missed any, please feel free to let me know!

Caring and Community

Even counting for the changes in standards and animal care philosophies over the past few decades, there's no shaking the fact some of the zoos that are now considering some of the best in the country were once pretty awful, even compared to their contemporaries.  Audubon Zoo, Zoo Atlanta, Central Park Zoo, and Oakland Zoo were once nationally famous - or infamous - for how bad their conditions were and how poor their animal care and facilities were.  

Sometimes there was a specific incident which triggered attention and outrage (a comment on the Oakland Zoo review I wrote reminded me of a fatal incident involving an elephant and a keeper at that facility).  Sometimes the general decline and decay finally just became too bad to be overlooked any longer.  In the case of Zoo Atlanta, a specific animal, Willie B the gorilla, became the rallying focus for the need to fix the zoo.

In these cases, there were always calls to shutter the zoo in question.  However, in each case, the community rallied around the zoo and helped rebuild.  I sometimes wonder, if such a list of bad zoos in major US cities were to come out today, how our communities would respond?

There's a tremendous loss of sense of community in many aspects of American life these days, resulting in weaker civic connections.  People don't seem to experience the same pride and attachment in their cities that they used to.  I see some people who share a tremendous amount of pride in their city zoos.  I see plenty of people who seem determined to find fault in every part of their community, the zoo being no exception, with a constant barrage of complaints that their local community can't do anything right.

Zoo Atlanta, Audubon Zoo, and the others are now excellent facilities with admirable standards of animal care and demonstrated commitment to conservation and animal welfare - but this didn't happen in a vacuum.  Turning around a zoo doesn't need complaints.  It needs resources and community support.  One could say that in many cases, a community has the zoo it deserves.

Zoo Review: Oakland Zoo, Part II

Continuing through the main body of the Oakland Zoo, the majority of the exhibit space is given over to the African Savanna exhibits.  

Like California Trail, this area tends to be skewed to the megafauna (but what zoo African area isn't?), though with the inclusion of a few smaller species as well.  Fauna doesn't come much more mega than African elephants, which inhabit one large (six acre) yard.  Since my visit I believe I'd heard that there was going to be something of a shuffling of elephants, with some older animals being sent out to a sanctuary, with the possibility of a breeding herd being established.  I'll have to see what transpires.  Next to the elephants is a very attractive hillside yard for lions, and well as an open paddock for giraffe, and side exhibits for warthog, spotted hyena, and plains zebra.  Part of the region has an African village motif, with one hut housing a small collection of African reptiles, with meerkats scurrying outside another.  A meshed-in enclosure holds a troop of delightful red-tailed monkeys, one of the most handsome of African primates, while two aviaries hold a variety of African birds (including Madagascar sacred ibis, a first for me).

One African exhibit is worthy of a little extra attention because of its curious story.  Separated a little bit from the other displays is a habitat of hamadryas, a desert-dwelling baboon from North Africa and the Middle East, with a spacious grassy yard sprawling out in front of a rocky cliff face.  At the dawn of this millennium, Oakland was on track to try and obtain that most beloved of zoo animals, the giant panda, and this exhibit was built to be the panda exhibit.  Pandas never came, alas, and so the baboons moved in.  Few if any animals match the star power of giant pandas, it is true, but I will say, I think a social group of active, engaged primates makes a better display than a perpetually sleeping (unless its snacking) black and white bear.  So in my mind it all worked out for the best.

As one might expect, the Wayne and Gladys Valley Children's Zoo is largely made up of domestic species, with petting opportunity for kids to interact with goats and sheep.  If domestics aren't your area of interest, however, I'd still recommend swinging through - there are enough "zoo" animals to make it worth your while as well.  A cliffside habitat houses a troop of lemurs, while North American river otters twirl about in front of underwater viewing windows.  There is a surprisingly diverse invertebrate collection in the House of Bugs.  A small collection of reptiles and amphibians can be seen in excellent terrariums in one building, with larger species - American alligators (with a giant mock-fossil croc skeleton nearby) and Aldabra tortoises - seen in outdoor enclosures.  Perhaps the most surprising - and exciting - feature of the children's zoo, however, is the bat exhibit.  A large colony of flying fox bats occupies a towering outdoor flight cage.  Visitors aren't able to walk in with the bats as they are in some indoor rainforest exhibits, but it's still extraordinary to see the large bats out and active in the sun.  (Not part of the children's zoo, but kids will probably want to take a trip to the rides area, located near the gondola station that leads to the California Trail).

The final area is Tropical Rainforest, which I found to be the most uneven of the exhibit areas.  It features fairly standard island habitats for white-handed gibbons and siamangs, a few small aviaries for rainforest birds and small primates, and a fairly ugly, over-engineered chimpanzee exhibit.  There is also a tiger exhibit which, while nice enough, pales compared to the lion and jaguar exhibits elsewhere in the zoo.  The last exhibit I saw in this region, however, was the real showstopper. 

Once a common species in US zoos, sun bears are now increasingly rare, being phased out to make room for the other tropical bear species, which seem to be more sustainable in numbers.  Most of the sun bear exhibits I've seen have been fairly meh.  Oakland's was gorgeous - huge and lushly planted, viewed from  an elevated pavilion that provided a treetop view of the enclosure.  I almost didn't see the bear, the exhibit was so big and dense - it was, in true sun bear fashion, clinging to a tree, mostly obscured by the trunk, and resting completely at ease.  Sun bears are fading out of the US fairly quickly now, with most of the remaining animals being quite old.  I wonder what will happen to this beautiful exhibit when it is emptied - a different tropical bear species, a primate, who knows?

Oakland Zoo is yet another example of a zoo that, in a surprisingly short amount of time, has managed to turn itself around from atrocious to quite good.  Many of its exhibits are of a stellar quality - particularly those of California Trail  - and it doesn't have any that I would really call poor (though certainly some that I would tinker with, given the chance).   I'd also love to see smaller animals get as much attention as the larger ones - the bird and herp collections are fairly small.  Still, it was a beautiful zoo with an interesting collection that was well-cared for in appropriate exhibits.  The commitments to conservation and animal welfare were highlighted throughout the facility.  I was glad to have visited - though I still need to go back to continue my sweep of the Bay Area facilities.

Zoo Review: Oakland Zoo, Part I

A tricky decision - only time to hit one zoo on a visit to the Bay Area, so which one to do?  After a bit of hemming and hawing between the three options (none of which I'd been to before), I decided to visit the Oakland Zoo.  It was a close call, I admit, but I'd heard some pretty exciting news about this once easily-overlooked zoo, especially their signature new exhibit, and decided to check it out.  While I'm always prone to major FOMO, and will definitely be back to check out San Francisco and Sacramento, I'm glad that I did take the chance to see this excellent mid-sized zoo.

Like many zoos, Oakland originated as a children's zoo - it actually was once called the "Baby Zoo" - being the pet project of two big game hunters who liked to catch their own animals for the exhibits.  As with many zoos, it squandered and sank into mediocrity until, like so many other city zoos, it found itself on an "America's Worst Zoo" list put out by the Humane Society of the United States.  And, as was the case with so many of the zoos that were similarly named and shamed, Oakland pulled itself together and rebuilt itself as an excellent zoo.  Now sprawling over 100 acres in Knowland Park, the zoo occupies a towering location over the city, providing sweeping views of the Bay Area.

The quality of the exhibits is set immediately upon entry with the flamingo exhibit.  Many zoos have a flamingo exhibit as their opening act - a display of activity, color, and noise with a recognizable species to get visitors excited about their journey.  Oakland's exhibit differs from many in being a completely enclosed aviary, which, while perhaps not as aesthetically pleasing as an open pond, allows their birds to be fully-flighted.  The lesser flamingos share their lagoon with African spoonbills in an attractive, bustling, if slightly malodorous (as flamingos tend to be) scene that will delight visitors as they get their bearings and decided where to set off to next.

Much of the recent growth has come from the opening of the 2018 California Trail.  This massive expansion is accessible via a sky gondola, with visitors riding cable areas across a vast, grassy valley to the entrance of the trail.  (The gondola ride is free for visitors - there is actually a separate skyride within the zoo that does charge admission, but is not required in order to see animals).  The animal experience begins before visitors even touch the ground - from the gondolas, they are given an excellent view of a large herd of American bison which grazes the valley below them.  Upon landing, they can embark on a looping trail that passes a series of enormous habitats, most of them the largest I've seen for animals of their species.  

Two giant aviaries hold two iconic raptor species of California, the bald eagle and the California condor.  This is the fourth zoo that I've seen California condors at, and this aviary was easily the most spectacular.  Adjacent to the aviary was a viewing pavilion that featured excellent exhibits on the conservation of America's largest (and perhaps most endangered) bird, including how zoos have been involved in its conservation.   There are open habitats for gray wolves (surprisingly to me, not of the Mexican subspecies), American black bears, and grizzly bears, the later being especially impressive when seen eye to eye through the viewing windows of their pool, towering over visitors.  Covered habitats feature puma and jaguar.  The jaguar habitat was especially beautiful, a recreation of the chaparral habitat that these big cats once inhabited in the land that Oakland now sits on.  The puma exhibit also caught my interest, even though I didn't actually see one out.  Oakland serves as sort of a clearing hour for orphaned mountain lion cubs, which are brought to the zoo for emergency medical care and rearing, then dispersed to other zoos for permanent housing.  The trail ends with a gorgeous overlook of the bison and the Bay Area, before gondolas sweep visitors back to the main zoo.

I was a bit surprised to see that this is all that California Trail offered, and as incredible as they exhibits were, I think that they could have stood to be complemented by some of the Golden State's smaller inhabitants.  It would have been great to have had a walk-through aviary of California's smaller birds, such as quail, passerines, and waterfowl, or a reptile house/aquarium/invertebrate house, or maybe a small nocturnal building.  Something that would make the exhibit a little more along the lines of Oklahoma City Zoo's Oklahoma Trails. I love native exhibits, but I think they work best when they also include the smaller species that call a region home.  California Trail features a grand total of eight species - three of which are extinct in California (except for the odd vagrant) and one of which was extinct, was reintroduced, and is now found only in very limited patches of the state.  Still, the quality of the exhibits was incredible and the scenery was gorgeous.

The main zoo may lack the panache of California Trail, but still features some excellent exhibits (as well as a few less excellent ones).  It's divided roughly into four regions - Africa, Tropical Rainforest, Australia, and the Children's Zoo.  The Australia area I was forced to miss out on - it was actually closed at the time of my visit, because it was only accessible via a train ride.  I'm been told that it houses emus and wallaroos.  Tomorrow, I'll recap the other three regions of the zoo.

Oakland Zoo  

Trust No One

Excellent advise from an expert source - and which I can relate to.

I once was taking care of a jaguar exhibit on my first week at a new job, when the pool clogged.  A keeper who had been there longer than me responded to my call and come to help me fix it.  We'd been looking at the drain for a few minutes when suddenly he jolted upright.  He realized that, answering my call, he'd walked into the jag exhibit with me - without confirming that the cat was safely locked away.

Immediately, he ran to the holding building to confirm that she was secure before coming back out.  I mean, if she hadn't have been, it would probably have already been too late for at least one of us.

He brushed it off later, joking that he told tell right off the bat that I seemed reliable enough to have locked the cat away before inviting him in.  Still, it did teach me not to take it personally when people want to double check on what I say I've done for their own safety - and that I should never hesitate to double check on them.

Knowing Normal

After many years spent in the company of wild animals - enough to at least finally convince myself that I'm not an expert - I've come to the conclusion that the most important skill for a zookeeper is to be able to define "normal."  There are two parts to the definition - knowing normal for a species, (say, American black bear), which will come from having worked with/around multiple individuals of that species, and getting a baseline for what normal black bear behavior is, so that if you were suddenly given a new bear into your charge, you'd be able to know if it's normal or not.  The other is normal for an individual, say one specific bear.  This comes from knowing that particular animal and what is normal for them.

(It's worth noting that these two definitions of normal could be pretty divergent.  It's funny that we accept that with domestic animals a lot more readily than we do wild ones.  If one person says that their dog is super high energy and likes to go for runs and play active games all day, and another person says their dog is a little couch potato and just wants to curl up for belly-rubs, no one finds that strange.  Try telling a keeper that your bear, or big cat, or primate deviates from species "normal" and the immediate assumption is that there is something wrong with it.)

The better you know normal, in and out, the more easily you will be able to identify when something is not normal.  Now, just because something is abnormal doesn't necessarily mean it's bad - if an animal's normal is in some ways undesirable, such as being aggressive or anxious, a change from that could be good, and might be something you can build on.  An animal that is pregnant may likewise deviate from its normal.  But even if the change is a bad one - a symptom of illness, or injury, or behavioral problems - your best bet to catch it and treat it early is to notice a deviation from your animal's norm.

The only way to really know that norm is to spend a lot of time with your animals.  This is where the interplay of the keepers, curators, and veterinarians becomes integral to animal welfare.  By virtue of their (usual) tenure in the field, curators and vets have often worked with a larger number of individual animals of a given species than keepers.  To pull an example, I've worked with just over a dozen individual spider monkeys (of two species) in the course of my career.  When I was animal manager at a particular zoo with spider monkeys, I was able to use that knowledge to form a baseline of normal spider monkey behavior - what foods and enrichment they typically liked, what their cold tolerance was, how best to furnish their enclosure, and so on.

At this point in my career, I wasn't taking daily care of the individual four monkeys at the zoo as much - some of them I didn't really know as individuals.  For that, I was more dependent on the keepers, who new those animals as individuals.  Maybe many spider monkeys loved a certain food item, but our male hated it.  Maybe spider monkeys I worked with elsewhere were habituated to going outside at a certain temperature, but our older female found it too uncomfortably cold.  If I had seen our male rejecting what I considered a favorite food item, or the female refusing to shift outside on a day that was, in my experience, perfectly acceptable for spider monkeys, I might have seen a problem where there actually wasn't one.  

I'm increasingly of the opinion that, when it comes to animals, almost no one is actually an expert... but most people involved with the animals have some form of expertise that they can offer.  We should be willing to listen to all sources of that expertise to help best inform the decisions about our animals.

Book Review: West with Giraffes

The San Diego Zoo is easily one of the most famous - if not the most famous - zoos in the world, so it's hard to remember that there was a time when it was a younger, newer zoo, without all of the animals it has today.  Those animals all had to come from somewhere, and each of the species in the zoo has a story of how that first individual arrived.  Few species had a more dramatic arrival to the zoo than its first giraffes, which rode a deadly hurricane into New York City harbor in 1938, under the shadow of the looming World War.  From that chaotic entry, they made their perilous way across the country by truck (and this was before the interstate system was developed, mind you) on their way to California.

That much really happened, and would be a fascinating story on its own.

Author Lynda Rutledge tweaks and dramatizes the odyssey in West with Giraffes, a fictionalized story of the giraffes crossing Depression Era America from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Interspersed with news articles, letters, and other communiques, West with Giraffes follows three unlikely human companions who join the giraffes on their quest.  The crusty-yet-caring zoo manager ends up picking up a homeless Oklahoma drifter, one of many such wandering young men of the era, as well as a young woman who is desperate to make a life for herself as a photographer and sees the giraffes as the story of her lifetime.  Together, they deal with dangerous roads, natural disasters, and scheming rogues who would steal the priceless, delicate animals away.  Adding to the drama is the very significant injury that one of the giraffes has suffered during the stormy arrival in New York, and the race to get them safely to San Diego.

West with Giraffes reminds me very much of Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen's tale of a Depression Era circus and its elephant, which was made into a major movie a few years ago.  (Readers of Gruen's book who may have been turned off by some of the violence against animals in it can rest assured that this book is tamer on that score).  Both stories offer a beautiful tale of the bond that can develop between animals and caretakers, as well as those that can form between people united by their love of animals.  It helps that it also takes place at a time when the vast majority of people in the US had never seen a giraffe.  Today they are one of the most common of all zoo animals.  Back then, they were almost mythical, their presence largely limited to a few elite East Coast zoos.

Rutledge's book jumps occasionally to the modern day, where the narrator's memory is called back to the 30's and its giraffes after he hears a news story mentioning how giraffes are silently going extinct.  I appreciate the recognition of this conservation crisis which, compared to elephants, rhinos, and tigers, has largely been overlooked by the world.  For the most part, however, it follows the trip from coast to coast.   That was the only part of this story that hampered my enjoyment.  

With each state that our protagonists - human and giraffe - crossed into, I knew that we were that much closer to the end of their journey... and ours.

West with Giraffes at Amazon.com

Darkness at Midday

Looking back through the annals of this blog, I see that this is the third time in ten years I've done an eclipse post.  Every single time, there is a lot of fuss and to-do in the media about how the animals will react to the sudden disappearance of the sun (for a few minutes).  This go-around was no exception, with many facilities even encouraging visitors to come and visit so that they could play scientist and observe any unusual animal behaviors (eclipse glasses being included in price of admission, in many cases.

Spoiler alert - there really aren't any.  I heard a few cases of animals that started to head from their outdoor exhibits to their night houses because they thought it was time to come in, but that's about the extent of it.  

For what it's worth, my zoo didn't really do anything for the animals.  They were all fine.  They did, however, feel the need to send all employees an email reminding us not to look directly at the sun.  Apparently, they have a lot more confidence in the intelligence of the animals than us.

But Are You Happy?

Zoo professionals and volunteers in the U.S: experiences and prevalence of burnout, mental health, and animal loss

An interesting paper from McDonald et al, carried out with staff at the Denver Zoo.  It takes a look at animal care and health professionals (so, keepers, curators, vets, vet techs) and compares them with other zoo staff (in non-animal roles) to gauge their happiness and professional fulfillment.  The results should be of concern to any zoo manager.  Folks enter this field to fulfill a dream of working with animals, but that dream takes its toll in the form of anxiety, depression, and professional burnout.

Mammal Names for Mammals?

Prior to doing a little research for the species fact profile, I had no idea who the "Francois" of Francois's langur was.  That's the case for many of the mammals named after people, though some I've picked up some clue over the years.  Which got me thinking - with all of the to-do about renaming birds that are named after people, why isn't there a similar outcry about mammals?

Part of it has to do with the fact that there are far fewer such names to worry about - there being more than twice as many species of birds compared to mammals, and with far more mammal species (at least from my impressions) have unique names than birds.  How many mammal species can you think of that have names that are a single word - lion, tiger, jaguar, etc - compared to birds?  Also, the call for change of bird names was driven in part by birdwatchers (many local, North American birds are named after people, unlike mammals), as there isn't a similarly-active mammal-watching community.

There are still a reasonable handful of mammal species named after people, spread unevenly across the family tree.  Very few carnivores, for example, have "human" names - and really none of the commonly kept zoo species.  Few primates do either, though more, I feel, than carnivores.  You start seeing it a lot more when you get into the hoofstock (the gazelles, man... Speke's gazelle, Grant's gazelle, Thompson's gazelle), and then the small fry, like the rodents and bats.

Baird's tapir - or should I say Central American tapir? - named after Spencer Fullerton Baird, a former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute.  Also, if we do change the name to Central AMERICAN tapir, then aren't we, in fact, indirectly naming the species are Amerigo Vespucci?

Sometimes there's a fun quirky story behind a name, like how the largest species of zebra was named after the President of the French Republic, Jules Grevy, after one was presented to him as a gift from Abyssinia.  Other times, it's seemingly meaningless - attributed to a patron or colleague of the person responsible for the discovery.  Ideally, all species would have names of some significance - either a local name by which the species is known (as in the okapi), a descriptive name (i.e., yellow-backed duiker), or a geographic name (Amazon river dolphin).  Though even these can have inaccuracies - the American black bear, for instance, isn't always black, while the Sumatran rhinoceros was historically found throughout Southeast Asia.

So, naming animals is a science, but it isn't a perfect science.   Many species have multiple common names, which makes the Latin name all that much more important.  Common names also have a tendency of changing over time, so it's just as well not to get too attached to any of them.

Species Fact Profile: Francois' Langur (Trachypithecus francoisi)

                                                                   Francois' Langur

                                            Trachypithecus francoisi (de Pousargues, 1898)

Range: Southern China (Guangxi Province), northern Vietnam, and west-central Laos

Habitat:  Lowland Tropical and Subtropical Rainforest, Evergreen Broadleaf Forest (especially associated with limestone karst outcroppings), up to 600 meters elevation

Diet:  Leaves, bark, shoots, seeds, flowers, and nectar

Social Grouping: Social groups usually consist of one male with multiple females, 3-30 individuals total (average is 12)

Reproduction: Breeding takes place throughout the year, peaking in autumn and winter.  Single infant born once a year after gestation period of 6-7 months.  Weaned at about 2 years old.  Sexually mature at 4-5 years old

Lifespan: 25 Years

      Conservation Status:  IUCN Endangered, CITES Appendix II.  USFWS Endangered

• Body length 40-76 centimeters, tail length 74-96 centimeters, weight 4-14 kilograms.  Males are slightly larger than females (also have longer tails).  Small heads (crowned with a long, pointed crest) lacking cheek pouches.  Tail is long and straight.  Forelegs shorter than high legs.  Thumbs are well-developed and opposable
  
• Fur is uniform brown, black, or dark gray, with a white stripe running from the corner of the mouth to the ear, resembling sideburns.  There is also a smaller amount of white in the crest above the eyes, resembling eyebrows.  Infants are golden-yellow with a black tail, transitioning to adult coloration at about 6-12 months old 
  
• Home range size of about 150 hectares, daily range about 1,000 meters.  Males defend the territory with hoarse vocalizations.  Juvenile males leave the natal troop at 3-4 years old and either form a bachelor group or try to join another family troop.  Females remain in the troop
  
• Highly arboreal, typically moving through the trees on all four legs.  Sometimes jump from tree to tree by pushing off with their hind legs.  Active by day.  Often encountered resting on cliff ledges (long periods of rest needed to facilitate digestion).  Sleeps in limestone caves (may have more than half a dozen regularly used sleeping sites in range, rotated to avoid predators)
  
•  Other females in a troop will assist mother with raising her young, may adopt infant if mother is killed.  It is possible that it is the bright orange coloration of the juvenile which triggers paternal behavior in other langurs.  Males do not assist in rearing the young
  
• Leaves are the more important component of the diet in the dry season, other foods in the wet season.  Large forestomach (part of a multi-chambered stomach) hosts bacteria to digest cellulose 
  
• Most significant predator of adults is cloudedleopard.  Juveniles are vulnerable to large raptors, such as crested serpent eagle and mountain hawk-eagle.  Predation not considered to be a major source of mortality
  
• Northernmost range of any langur species
•  Species is named after Auguste Francois, the French Consul at Lungchow, Kwangsi, China who identified specimens in the wild
  
• Threats include loss of habitat both for logging and agricultural expansion (fires used to clear forest for fields also destroy feeding sites – limestone is also vulnerable to fire, leading to the destruction of resting sites), hunting for food and use in Traditional Chinese Medicine (used to make “black ape wine”), capture for the pet trade

Fool Me Once

"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you.  Fool me - you can't get fooled again"

- George W. Bush

April Fool's Day is a fun chance to play some (hopefully harmless) pranks on the general public, as well as coworkers.  The stakes, admittedly, are kind of low - the worst that it likely to happen is have a gag which falls flat and no one finds very funny.  Besides, when it comes to April Fool's Day, most people, on some level, want to be fooled, to be part of the joke.

It's a lot harder when you're trying to fool the animals.

Whether it's getting them to take some medication that they are not inclined to consume, or go into a pen to be trapped up, or any, keepers and vet techs are frequently having to match wits against their animals.   The problem is that, like people, many animals can be difficult to outwit with the same trick more than once.  It's an easy enough matter to coax an animal that lives in a very large enclosure into a smaller, enclosed space to be caught up - once.  Trying to do it a second time, they'll be on to your ways.  I worked with a large troop of spider monkeys that, through teamwork, was often able to thwart our efforts to catch them.  No matter how nice the treats we put inside were, they all resisted the urge to stampede in at once and allow me to close the door behind them.  Some would come in first while the others hung back outside, then they'd switch spaces so that I could never get all of them inside at once.  

Convince an animal to take a tasty treat stuffed with not so tasty medicine?  Sure, not too hard.  If you injected a jelly donut with cod liver oil, I'd probably scarf it down so fast at first that I wouldn't catch what horror had been wrought - at least until it was too late.  Offer me another jelly donut, however, and you can bet I'll be a little more suspicious, and maybe inclined to take a quick sniff or lick before gulping it down.  So much for easy medication.  

The safest way to get around this is to not trick the animals at all, but to collaborate with them.  If the animal comes to learn that being herded into that small space isn't the end of the world - more like a minor inconvenience, for which it will be richly rewarded, perhaps - it'll be a lot more inclined to cooperate.  With enough experimentation, you can also usually find some reward to mask even the most unpalatable of medicines.

There are times when your relationship with your animals will take on an unfortunate adversarial role (at least in their eyes) where you have to be the bad guy, just as parents are sometimes the bad guys in the eyes of their children.  In situations like these, where you have to get the animal to do something that it doesn't want to do, it's generally better to use trickery than force or intimidation.  Far better than either, however, is cooperation.  

Which also saves you some embarrassment from the animals outwitting you, as they so frequently do.

The Blue Flamingo

 It's that time of year again...

Satire: An Easter Revenge

 

Species Fact Profile: Pacific Sea Nettle (Chrysaora fuscescens)

                                                              Pacific Sea Nettle

                                            Chrysaora fuscescens (Brandt, 1835)

Range: Northeastern Pacific Ocean, from southern Canada to Mexico.  Occasionally seen in western Pacific, near Japan

Habitat:  Coastal Waters.  Usually found near the surface in shallow water, but can congregate in deeper water in warm weather

Diet:  Zooplankton, Crustaceans, Mollusks, Small Fish, Jellies

Social Grouping: Asocial, but found in large congregations

Reproduction: Capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction.  Females catch sperm released by males, fertilizing eggs they are holding onto.  Fertilized eggs are attached to her arms, then released as polyps which attach to solid surfaces.  Polyps replicate themselves to form nettles, then release themselves from the surface they are clinging to, undergo metamorphosis, and take on a drifting lifestyle

Lifespan: 6-18 Months

      Conservation Status:  IUCN Not Evaluated

• Jelly with a distinctive golden-brown, lobed bell, capable of growing up to 1 meter in diameter, though usually less than half that.  They long, trailing tentacles (white oral arms and about two dozen maroon tentacles) may be up to 4.5 meters long
• Swims using jet propulsion, pushing water through the bell to allow them to swim against the currents.  Usually prefers simply to float, however
• Catch prey with toxin-laden tentacles drifting in the water, with barbed stingers being released when prey is contacted.  The oral arms begin digestion as prey is transported to the mouth 
• Primary defense mechanism is the potent sting of the tentacles, but some predators seem to not be effected by it.  Predators include large fish, seabirds, cetaceans, and especially the leatherback sea turtle.  The sting is painful, but generally not dangerous, to humans (common name references the stinging nettle plant of Eurasia)
• Small crabs sometimes hide within the bell of the nettle for protection, and may sometimes nibble at their hosts
• Populations have been increasing and range expanding.  Both climate change and pollution (industrial and agricultural runoff dumping nutrients into the water) have been suggested as possible causes

The Secret Lives of Prairie Dogs

Prairie dogs have always been a puzzle to me.  I've worked with them at four zoos, watched pups come into the world, tended injured animals after their frequent savage fights, and acted as a human scarecrow trying to keep hawks away.  But unlike many of the species I've worked with, I've never really felt like I've known prairie dogs.  That's because so much of their life history takes place underground, out of sight and, largely, out of mind of their caretakers.

Salisbury Zoo, Smithsonian research the secret lives of prairie dogs

I was interested and excited to hear about this new study of prairie dogs being initiated at the Salisbury Zoo, with the support of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.  There's so much we don't know about how these animals, which play such an important role in American prairie ecosystems, live their lives.  In cases like this, the zoo can serve as a laboratory to help further our knowledge, as well as to perfect techniques which can later be applied to studying wild populations.

Salisbury Zoo is, of course, one of the tinier of American zoos, easily overshadowed by the big zoos in the region.  This goes to show, however, that even the smallest of zoos - and the most common, most oft overlooked zoo animals - have the potential to contribute to expanding our knowledge base of the natural world.

What a Waste

Not that long ago, our zoo was hosting a special event which required an "all hands on deck" clean up effort.  I was assigned to clean up a planted area, spacious, but not inhabited by animals for many years, towards the center of the zoo.  It was right up against our food court and main visitor services hub.  I was horrified.  Not by the amount of trash I pulled - that I fully expected - but by the fact that, by the time that I was done, at least half of my bag was filled with photo strips from the nearby photo booth.

It was as if visitors were going in, getting their pictures taken, and then immediately dumping them in the bushes outside.

Today, I engaged in my annual ritual of getting food from our concessions, which I do exactly once per year.  As I waited for my order, I watched in awe as patron after patron dumped mostly-full trays of food in the trash, purchased to placate hungry toddlers who then decided that they didn't want it after all.

I could sense the irritation of the parents.  Zoo food ain't cheap.

So much of the zoo's messaging is about conservation, and so much about conservation is about sustainability - being mindful of what we use (or, in this case, don't use).  I feel like whenever this topic comes up, you have people complaining about how this is going to involve all of us living miserably with terrible qualities of life, having to sacrifice everything on the altar of conservation.

Really, though, we won't.    How much oil is consumed to make plastic crap that's thrown immediately away?  How many acres of habitat cleared to grow food which is just thrown away?  It would make a huge diverse to the sustainability of our planet if we would just produce what we actually need and not squander so much.  That's a key lesson we should be trying to live by - and to share with the public.

(... and Aquarium)

There's an old "zoo man" that I'm friends with, someone in the mold of the old-school curators and directors of decades long past; I think we would have been perfectly at home working alongside Hornaday at the Bronx, or Mann at National.  He's the sort of guy who's visited every zoo, seen every animal, and has an encyclopedic memory of all of them.  He's also the sort of guy who retains strong opinions on how things should be properly done.

I had been talking with him recently after my visit to Sedgwick County Zoo, a facility that I enjoyed very much, when he cut me off after a bit and said, "It's a fine enough zoo.  Of course, to be truly great it would need an aquarium."

I unpacked this a bit with him.  His ideal for a zoo was based in the older European tradition, in which a truly great zoo was defined by its buildings.  The Bird House, the Reptile House, a Small Mammal House (which might be a nocturnal house)… and the Aquarium.  To his mind, a zoo could not be great without an aquarium.  How could a park have "zoology" in the name and then cut itself off from the biomes that cover three-quarters of the planet's surface?  (I've heard similar arguments made about the dearth of invertebrate exhibits in zoos... and made a few of those arguments myself).  It's been a longstanding tradition in many European zoos, dating back to when the first public aquarium opened at the London Zoo in the nineteenth century.

In the United States, zoos and aquariums tend to be separate facilities.  Sometimes they retain an association, as the New York zoos have with their aquarium under the umbrella of the Wildlife Conservation Society.  In other cases, they are completely separate with no shared membership or management, though they may collaborate on occasion.   Then there are the facilities that have an aquarium building as part of their main campus, and may even take on the name, "Zoo and Aquarium."  Facilities that fall into this category include Point Defiance, in Tacoma, Washington (which has two aquarium buildings), Pittsburgh, Columbus, and, most recently, Kansas City.

The extent of the zoo-aquariums varies.  None that I've seen so far has even come close to the size and comprehensiveness of the giant US aquariums, like Shedd, Georgia, or Monterey Bay.   Sometimes it's as simple as a few small fish or jelly tanks situated around a stingray touch pool, or in association with a penguin or sea lion exhibit - in which case I feel like the zoo might just be giving itself airs (and by which theory Sedgwick could claim that it, too, has an aquarium, because it has fish on display in its rainforest building).  I don't like the idea of tacking on aquarium just for the sake of saying you have one.  Aquariums require a lot of expense, a lot of infrastructure and investment, and a lot of expertise to run properly.  If you find yourself in possession of indoor real estate that can be devote to animals at your zoo, there's other things you can do with that space.

So, for most of my career, I've felt that separate and specialized is best.  Zoos are best left to handle terrestrial animals, aquariums with the aquatic, with a little overlap.

I recently visited Memphis Zoo for the first time in well over a decade.  Despite not doing so, the Zoo probably has a better claim than some others to tack on "and Aquarium" to its name.  The aquarium in question is a fairly small building, located towards the west end of the zoo.  It consists of a series of fairly small tanks - mostly freshwater in scope - situated around the perimeter of a small room.  There are no sharks or sea turtles here, no grand vistas of coral reefs or kelp forests.  The selection of animals was modest and well-suited for the size of the building.  Another zoo might have cleared most of the tanks away for one, maybe two, room-sized tanks with one or two small side tanks, just to say that they had sharks, octopus, jellies, and sea horses, checking the boxes for what most casual visitors would want to see.  Instead, most of the species chosen for this building were smaller, and more obscure, which actually made them more interesting to me than seeing the same exhibits that I've seen at a dozen places.

When I left to go back out to explore the rest of the zoo, I thought, "This was nice.  A fun break, highlighting a diversity of species, and it would be a nice addition to the zoo on days when the weather was poor."  Something like that I feel would be a welcome addition to many large zoos.

The One That Got Away

 

ReSharking the Oceans

Sharks are among the most famous and popular of aquarium residents.  As a group, they also represent some of the most endangered species in the oceans.  Unlike many terrestrial species kept in zoos, many species of shark don't reproduce especially reliably.  Fortunately, one of the species that does breed well is the endangered zebra shark.  I recently learned about the organization ReShark, which is dedicated to rewildling the world's oceans and rebuilding crashed shark populations.  The zebra shark reintroduction project in Indonesia is an exciting early project from this group.  

Species Fact Profile: Ocellated Stingray (Potamotrygon motoro)

                                                                  Ocellated Stingray

                                            Potamotrygon motoro (JP Muller & Henle, 1841)

Range: Northern and Central South America, including the Amazon, Uruguay, Parana-Paraguay, and Orinoco River systems

Habitat:  Calm Freshwater Habitats – slow moving rivers, lagoons, streams, with a preference for sandy-bottoms to facilitate burrowing.  Found for 0.5-10 meters depth

Diet:  Neonates feed on plankton.  Juveniles feed on small mollusks, crustaceans, and aquatic insect larvae.  Adults primarily consume fish

Social Grouping: Primarily solitary outside of breeding season.  Not territorial, do not maintain home range

Reproduction: Ovoviviparous.  Breeding takes place at night, male clamping onto the female with his jaws.  Mate during the dry season (June through November) with births taking place during the rainy season.  Eggs about 3 centimeters in diameter.  Young nurtures of fatty secretions inside the mother’s uterus.  Gestation usually 6 months, but has been as short as 3 months in aquariums.  3-21 pups (average is 7, but always an odd number) born per litter.  Larger females tend to give birth to larger litters.  May abort young under stress. Females usually give birth to one litter a year for three years, then take a few years off

Lifespan: 15 Years

      Conservation Status:  IUCN Data Deficient

• Roughly oval-shaped.  Robust tail ends with a venomous spine.  Maximum length of 100 centimeters (more commonly 50 centimeters), weigh up to 35 kilograms (more commonly 15 kilograms).  Tail of equal length to disc. Females usually slightly larger than males.
• Eyes positioned on dorsal surface of the head, providing 360 degree visibility. Possess electroreceptors, highly sensitive, that allow for detection of prey and predators.  Also have well-developed sense of smell
• Background color is greyish-brown (very light, almost tan in some individuals, very dark in others), with orange-yellow dorsal eyespots, each surrounded with a black ring larger than the eyes.  Coloration extends onto the tail\
•     Pups are sexually mature at 20-44 centimeters in disc length, with females requiring a larger size than males to be deemed mature and captive specimens reaching sexual maturity at a smaller size than wild individuals (in males, sexually maturity can also be ascertained by the relative size of the pelvic claspers)       
• Undergo cyclical migration patterns within freshwater systems, traveling up to 100 kilometers, cause unknown      
• Major defensive mechanisms are camouflage, burrowing down into the river substrate, and the tail, which has a venomous spine at the tip.  Primary predators are caimans, though may be consumed by larger fish species as well
• Also known as the peacock-eye stingray, orange-spot stingray, or the black river stingray.  Some consideration that it may represent a species complex of closely-related freshwater stingrays
• Status is unknown throughout range, but not believed to be in danger due to widespread range, generalist dietary and habitat requirements, and little commercial demand
• One of the most popular freshwater stingray species seen in the pet trade.  Husbandry considered fairly easy, but requires a large tank.