To Post, or Not To Post?

It sometimes seems like it's a rare occasion when there isn't some sort of life-or-death drama going on behind the scenes at the zoo.  Maybe it's a neonatal animal struggling through the first few days of life, or having to be hand-reared.  Maybe it's an animal combatting a disease, or recovering from an injury.  Maybe it's the delicate introduction of potential breeding partners, with the potential for either the next generation of a species being born... or a violent, potentially fatal, interaction.

Even those members of the staff who aren't directly involved in the goings-on usually find out about it pretty soon, sometimes through an email in which the curator tries to see how many times she can fit the word CONFIDENTIAL in a single sentence.  It never takes too long for the news to percolate to the folks who handle our social media, at any rate, which leads to the inevitable question:  When can we post this?

Opinions vary from zoo to zoo, from those that would never share any negative information - nothing ever died, at one zoo I worked at, if you listed to our guest services folks - to those who like to put everything out in the open.  I generally favor things being out in the open, to the extent that it will not compromise animal welfare.  For example, if you have a beloved, popular animal that is battling illness, it can be distracting to have reporters constantly calling you up, people trying to interpose themselves (maybe even sneaking behind the scenes) to see what's up, stuff like that.

People are more inclined to support a zoo or aquarium if the trust it, and that means being confident that the people who work there are really doing their best to help the animals be as happy and healthy as possible.  If an animal is going to die, it may be for the best that the public understands the Herculean efforts that went into to saving it, rather than just being caught off-guard by the bad news when it breaks.    Let the public mourn with us when things go bad, and celebrate with us when they go well... and hold our breath with us at all the dicey moments in between. 

Reunited, And It Feels So Good

There was a time - no so long ago, really - when the birth of any great ape in a zoo was such a rare, tremendous occurrence that the baby was deemed too delicate and precious to be entrusted to the mother.  Parenting, the thought process was, was too important to be left to amateurs, and baby gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees would be whisked away to be raised by human caretakers.  This had a regrettable tendency to result in behaviorally-incompetent animals that were not, in turn, suitably prepared to raise their own young when the time came, causing those offspring to be hand-reared as well.  And so the cycle went on...

Today, great apes, like almost all mammals, are left with their mothers whenever possible.  Sometimes, situations play out in such a way that the baby must be removed for one reason or another.  At Busch Gardens Tampa, for example, female orangutan Luna had to undergo a caesarian section, and her infant had to be removed while she recovered from the surgery.  The park was very open with the public about all of this (and yet still managed to see dozens of comments along the lines of, "But why isn't it with it's mom?"... read the caption, people!), as well as the fact that their end goal was getting the mother-child duo reunited as soon as possible.

"As soon as possible" turned out to be fairly fast, and mom and baby are once again together, and the bonding has begun. 

   

These stories don't always have an ending that's so happy - recently, a baby gorilla was born at Fort Worth Zoo, but the mother wasn't able to provide care.  A few decades ago, the Fort Worth keepers would have just raised the baby on their own, and I'm sure it would have been an absolute rockstar of an animal celebrity at the zoo.  Instead, the decision was made that the baby needed a proper social group more than Fort Worth needed a social media boost, and the baby was packed off to Cleveland, where a surrogate mother was found.

Every situation is different, so every outcome is different.  What's important is finding an outcome that provides the animal with the best chance of having a happy, healthy, properly-socialized life.

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!