LIONS ARE VERY EASY BUT JELLYFISH ARE A NIGHTMARE!
DOMINIC UTTON joins the keepers at London Zoo as they begin the tricky task of counting all of its 19,218 residents as part of a mandatory annual stocktake
ON A freezing February morning in London, the penguins are lining up two by two. Or that’s the idea, anyway. The reality is they’re hopping and waddling in a chaotic rush towards handler Zuzana Matyasova, desperate to get their beaks into the bucket of fish she’s holding.
In Zuzana’s other hand is a clipboard. And as the mad parade of birds cluster around her, she’s attempting to count them. It’s not the easiest of tasks.
This is the annual London Zoo stocktake – and every last mammal, bird, reptile, fish and invertebrate must be accounted for, from these Humboldt penguins down to the tiny partula snails. Some are more straightforward than others.
“We’ve got 19,218 animals at the zoo and every one of them has to be tallied,” says manager Mark Habben. “Believe me when I say penguins are not the most difficult. People assume birds will be the hardest but the worst are species such as fish and jellyfish. They’re very challenging. Often we have to take photos and count from that.”
He also confesses that when it comes to the tiny animals they have to employ more creative methods. For instance, ant colonies count as one rather than thousands of individual ants.
Mark has been working at the zoo for 18 years, starting as a bird keeper and working his way up to manager. It is the world’s oldest scientific zoo, first opening to the public in 1847 and it now welcomes more than a million visitors a year. I have joined Mark and his 70-strong team for this year’s stocktake, as they tally the 700 species held here.
“We start before the doors open to the public,” he says, “but the size of the task means we have to keep at it throughout the day. In all it takes a full week.”
And although the zoo uses technology such as microchips to monitor its residents, licensing requirements mean that the data still has to be corroborated the old-fashioned way with clipboard and pen.
Back at the penguins Zuzana has had a setback: a pair of invading herons have joined the party and while attempting to shoo them away she’s lost count. Another bucket of fish is produced, the process begins again… and finally she’s got a figure. Eighty-four Humboldt penguins: exactly as expected.
Next up are the lions, “much easier”, says Mark. The zoo has four Asiatic lions, three females and one male, a magnificent beast called Bhanu. As the gates are opened he’s the last to appear, emerging with a snarl before fixing us with a baleful gaze that seems to pose the question: just who is counting whom, exactly?
“We’re not breeding lions at the moment so we can be sure there’s just these four,” says Mark. Although at the next stop, BUGS (standing for “Biodiversity Underpinning Global Survival” and home to most of the zoo’s invertebrates), things are more complicated.
“We’ve embarked on a fantastic breeding programme for our orb spiders,” says Mark, “and we’re also breeding Madeira Deserta wolf spiders, which are a critically endangered species, as part of a national programme with other zoos.”
The upshot of this? Something of a headache for spider expert Jamie Mitchell as he steps around the climate-controlled exhibit attempting to keep track of each expertly camouflaged spider without disturbing their networks of webs.
THINGS are even trickier around the corner where Colette Gibbings is peering through a porthole into a large tank of jellyfish and trying to follow them with her finger. As she does so, they expand and contract, circling around the tank in a strange dance – a cross between a lava lamp and a gentle washing machine spin cycle. There should be “around 130” of these moon jellyfish – though keeping sure past the first dozen or so is difficult. Each time she loses count Colette calmly starts again. London Zoo is very proud of its jellyfish. “We’ve really taken up the gauntlet for jellyfish breeding,” says Mark. “So much so that we’ve even been able to distribute them to other facilities.” The hidden spiders and dancing jellyfish couldn’t be in greater contrast to our next species. Squirrel monkeys are so named due to their ability to climb downwards head first. They are also extremely fast, agile and mischievous. London Zoo’s squirrel monkey enclosure is designed with no barriers between the animals and the visitors, who walk through a minirainforest of trees and high ropes while the monkeys swing beside, above and occasionally among them. So how do you keep track of such quick, acrobatic creatures?
By feeding them, of course. Keeper Tony Chollaston explains that the monkeys are “not only extremely active but also very food motivated”. By doling out handfuls of their favourite treats – in this case locusts – in specific areas around the enclosure, he can not only work out exactly which monkey is where but also keep them interested long enough to count.
It’s a system that works beautifully. Within minutes Tony’s maths is done: 16 squirrel monkeys logged and what one might expect to be among the hardest species to track turns out to be one of the easiest.
All of which begs one last question. Has this annual audit ever thrown up an unexpected result? Have they ever been confronted with a bonus couple of fruit bats? Or had a “one of our Komodo dragons is missing!” moment?
“Funny you should say that but we had a new arrival just a few weeks ago when Oni the okapi gave birth,” says Mark. “We named the newborn Meghan as a nod to the forthcoming royal wedding.
“But obviously that wasn’t exactly unexpected and of course we monitor all our animals daily so we’re not expecting too much in the way of surprises this week. But then you never know, right?”