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.