Excellent photo. I wonder if this is the male that's still there(one has left) and whether either female is pregnant yet.
Glad you like the pic . I assume that it is the one that is still there. It was only taken about three weeks ago, and on my visit we only saw 1.2 Drills. Don't know about any pregnancy sorry.
Yeah, I remember reading about them somewhere on here. Is Edinburgh the only British zoo to have them?
For almost forty years there were none in the UK at all! Now Port Lympne have a breeding group (imported from Stuttgart, Germany) with about six animals, but only one adult breeding pair. Also Woburn recently got a bachelor group of about five males which came from Hanover. Nearly all the Drills in European Zoos were born at either Hanover, Stuttgart or Barcelona so a lot are related. The two females at Edinburgh came from the US but even they are descended from the European groups at least partly if I remember correctly. (This male is from Barcelona I think)
It is a shame that there is little genetic diversity in the groups (out of interest, why do America/Africa/Asia/Australia not often bring their own individuals into the the European Breeding Programme and we put ours into their breeding programmes? Surely that would make a more diverse gene pool?)
A good point. It does happen occassionally but not often enough in my opinion, perhaps because of the costs involved with transportation? For example The European Gorilla population could certainly now do with an infusion of unrelated animals from e.g. the North American one, and possibly vice versa too. That is just one example. (But with Drills I think the few in America are mostly descended from European founder stock (Hanover etc) in the first place)
with regards to the zoo situation in Australasia (not drills specifically), a lot of the exotics originally come as surplus animals from Europe or America, so their offspring aren't wanted or needed back again (leaving out the matter of the high degree of inbreeding due to import restrictions and what you could refer to as "zoo management ennui")