How can we improve Zoos and Aquariums?

One must also not forget that when it comes to species like reptiles, amphibians and fishes there are also some practical limitations. It's quite expensive and complex to develop facilities to properly take care off and breed those species. Especially single-of exhibits are quite difficult.

For example aquarium filtration is cheaper and easier to have for an entire aquatic building then for a number of aquaria spread throughout the zoo. Things like live-feed cultures, reverse-osmosis water plants, automatic water mixing systems (either with salts, chemicals or with pure water) are especially more expensive and difficult to have all over the place. You could use a central hub, but these things are also easily taken care of in between things and transporting large amounts of prepared water is also very impractical.

For reptiles, you have incubators, breeding rooms, rearing terraria, live-feed storage etc. that's also best placed together, and the further away your terraria are from these facilities the more difficult it is to maintain them. Walking between spots also takes a lot of time, so either you have reptile keepers losing a lot of time on moving between exhibits or you have keepers taking care of different groups of animals. However those last ones have a will rarely develop in the experts you need to breed many reptiles and amphibians.

Edit. note that this is less of a problem in zoos with a taxonomical presentation, but more a problem for zoos working in larger geographical or habitat-based themes.

 

I've been to zoos with no charismatic species. They seem to have just as many visitors as other zoos - although the ones I have been to are all free. I don't think a zoo with an admission fee could stay busy with no charismatic animals.

 

Yes, but would these kind of facilities be on average more expensive to maintain then for example large carnivores like lions and tigers or large hoofstock like elephants and giraffe ?

I don't know the answer to that but I would be inclined to think that even with the electricity and energy costs associated with keeping reptiles, amphibians or fish etc these would be nothing compared to those generated by the examples of larger animals that I've given above.

 

Well I agree, I'm not saying that zoos should be keeping none of these.

I am merely suggesting that I believe there needs to be a minimal amount held within a collection and a much much larger focus on smaller taxa.

Perfect example in my opinion is Jersey zoo with its bears, orangutang and gorilla in terms of large species and its ring tailed lemurs in terms of smaller charismatics (I won't include the meerkat or Asian short clawed otter as I believe there are viable replacement species for these).

Bristol zoo was also an example of this with their gorillas, tapir and Asiatic lion but sadly their old site will be going.

 

To add to this a nice example of this, my two local zoos (same institution). The old Antwerp zoo with a taxonomical approach and the larger continental based Planckendael zoo. I excluded the few domestic species.

Antwerp:
- Mammals: 45 species (44 if you count the two gorilla species as one, as they live in the same exhibit)
- Birds: 129
- Reptiles: 68
- Amphibians: 13 (of-show probably a few more species)
- Fishes: ± 270
- Non-aquatic invertebrates: 20-30 butterflies, 6 other species on-show (several others of-show)
- Aquatic invertebrates: 2-3 sea-urchins, ±8 crabs/lobsters/shrimps, many corals, 2 aquatic snails, an octopus (usually) and a few shellfish.

Planckendael:
- Mammals: 62 (2 permanently of-show and 1 temporary species)
- Birds: 114 (of which several species only of-show in their breeding centre)
- Reptiles: 3
- Amphibians: 0
- Fishes: 1 (also 2 Cypriniformes in the moats)
- Invertebrates: 2 - 4 (not sure t.b.h., last time it seemed like they just had 3 terraria with the same phasmid species.

 

What zoo has just 1 fish species? Is it koi?

 

Yes, but these strike me as forward thinking exceptions to the general rule and trend in zoos.

 

It's not just the electricity costs (though these are probably higher in spread out exhibits then in a central building), but more the infrastructure and time that is the problem. I'd compare it with my own hobby, aquaria. A few aquaria throughout the house isn't a problem, but if you have 10 or more aquaria all spread throughout the house that is very time consuming. On the other hand having 30 or more tanks in one single room where you keep your food and products, have your live-feed cultures and a special refilling system isn't that time consuming at all. The price of building one big refilling and filtration system (it can be with different subsystems) is also much lower.

Zoo aquaria are exactly the same, just on a larger scale. They don't have time to fill back the water with 3 liter bottles at a time like I do, they have systems that are directly connected to water supplies so that they just have to open and close a single valve. It's very interesting to see how much infrastructure there is actually needed to maintain these facilities, and I highly recommend everyone to visit one if you ever have the chance.

They do have koi (not counted as a domestic form) as well besides carp and redshank in the moats, but that one species is a depressing tank with rainbow fishes.

 

Yes, I know what you mean, but my question would be is it as time consuming to staff or as costly in economic terms as elephants, white rhino, tigers or giraffe?

Furthermore, zoos are now subject to extreme economic restraints due to the recession as a result of the pandemic.

All the larger megafauna have a need for a far larger group of staff as well as all of the other economic considerations of food, veterinary care, upkeep and annual refurbishment of enclosures etc.

By comparison what are the overhead costs for having staff for aquaria or reptile / amphibian / invert houses or small mammals ?

I would argue that far less staff are needed for these exhibits and animals in zoos and therefore overhead costs would go down significantly as well as the general economic cost of maintaining a collection.

The best compromise would be to keep two or three charismatics that are preferably endangered (again, Jersey's spectacled bear, orangutang and gorillas come to mind) and the rest of the collection smaller endangered taxa.

 

Forgive me if I'm wrong but wasn't part of the reason they closed because of competition with bigger zoos?

 

I think it depends from situation to situation, and not an A or B situation but something with a large grey zone. Especially smaller mammals or birds can be included quite cost-efficiently, but instead of replacing megafauna these can easily be placed in the zones between megafauna. For the other groups, it's not always easy to include them in the theming but I do think that some zoos (like Planckendael) should consider which zones have the highest potential for reptile/amphibian diversity and have a zone there with multiple species. In particular their Asian zone comes to mind, in which they could have included more reptiles in their cave/temple.

It's a bit like the fantasy project I'm currently working on. For the North-American area, I have 3-4 zones (Sonora desert, Coastal redwood forests and Alaskan coastal rainforests, possibly also coastal kelp forests). The Sonora desert is a hotspot for reptiles, so it's easy to find enough species to make a reptile-focussed facility. On the other hand, the redwoods and Alaska aren't exactly known for their reptile and amphibian diversity so for those two zones I have only one single amphibian and that's it.

One can of-course be creative. In my asian zone I'm trying to make it so that buildings of different subareas are connected, that way I can have the reptiles spread out along the visitor path while still having them in the same connected building. This of-course isn't always a practically feasible option.

In the sense that their total collection is much more spread out over the different realms then many zoos or? It should be noted that Planckendael has actually reduced it's number of non mammals and birds over the years (they did had a small setup in the African section with a few invertebrates and maybe a reptile or two). Antwerp on the other hand has decreased everything, but most notably mammals (including some of the smaller species like the nocturnal house sadly enough). I do think their small mammal collection is sub-par compared to the big fauna they are bringing in however, especially the addition of 2 more big cats besides lions at the cost of the nocturnal house is a mistake in my opinion. On the other hand they have transformed 3 old siamang indoor cages into 3 very nice exhibits for small mammals. I can only hope their plans for a new small-mammal building are just stored for later and not given up.

 

No , you are somewhat right, but actually the situation is a lot more complicated then that and involves politics and I won't go into the details or the whys.

Even so I think the old Bristol zoo a superb example of a collection trimming itself down and following this model of smaller taxa and maintaining just a few large charismatics.

 

Ehhh not really. In my experience, the largest staff teams at a zoo are the reptile, bird, and education teams. The teams that work with the most individual animals but in smaller spaces than the large charismatic mammals. In reality if you replace say a bear with 2-3 smaller mammal species, you are not reducing the workload for those keepers. In fact it may take them longer to clean, prepare specific diets, enrichment, and do training with those 3 animals than it does for one bear species. You would still need the same number of keepers if not more if you replaced larger species with smaller ones.

For a real life example, a typical keeper team for elephants consists of at least one keeper per animal. If that exhibit takes up 3 acres of space you’d think that would be a waste of space that could be better suited for smaller species. But if you replace all the elephants on that space with say 50 species of bird, reptile, amphibian, small mammals, etc., you are not reducing the workload for the keepers and you would need about the same number of keepers to maintain those animals in the same space as you did before. You don’t save much money this way and in fact probably will need to hire more people as more species and more individuals usually mean more work even if the species are smaller.

 

Yes, I agree there is a lot of nuance to this and much of these considerations are case specific but statistically there is a bias towards large charismatic megafauna in zoos and that is beyond doubt.

I agree with you about them being cost efficient but I do still think that small mammals and birds of could replace or at least to be kept in larger quantities than mammalian megafauna in zoos.

Again, for example, look at the brilliant re-utilization of the old spectacled bear enclosure at the Nurnberg zoo for fishing cats.

 

You should of-course take into account that often using old exhibits that are no longer suited for megafauna for smaller species is quite cheap and demolishing would often be costly. I believe birds are actually not rarely kept in greater numbers then megafauna due to mixed aviaries. Take Planckendael, it only has 14 on-show aviaries, four ratites and one pond for their two pelican species. That's about half of the amount of non-domestic mammal exhibits (about 35 if I recall correctly), but still their bird species on-show greatly outnumber the mammal species.

 

San Diego for example. . . . . . . .

 

That does not address the conservation argument that I was suggestion, could more not be done in terms of space occupied by larger charismatic megafauna that are better conserved in-situ for the ex-situ conservation of smaller taxa ?

I would argue that it can and that this should be a direction followed by more zoos.

What about the economic costs of maintaining a large mammal like an elephant in captivity?

Well here are some figures from a study that was published last year on how much is spent annually on maintaining a herd of Asiatic elephants at ZSL Whipsnade (incidentally I reckon the costs in the USA would be far far higher):

"The cost of keeping a breeding herd of elephants at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo was estimated at £593 021–£641 863 per year, excluding indirect staffing costs, ground rent and contributions made by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) to field-conservation projects."

The cost breakdowns were:

"Elephant-keeper salaries* £235 008– £283 850 -Appropriate number of properly trained elephant-keeping staff; range dependent on individual career progression

Facilities support £59 200 Staff time around reactive and routine maintenance, subcontractor and material costs, heating costs, electricity, water, health-and-safety inspections and general waste disposal

Capital investment £50 000 Improved cow facility, taking 40 year lifespan into consideration

Exhibit maintenance and supplies £16 000 General exhibit maintenance and enrichment supplies Remain same Research costs £13 200 Researcher(s) to conduct longitudinal behavioural observations (6 months per year); interns/ placement students, etc; additional in-house ZSL staff time [i.e. Research Officer (10%)]

Animal supportstaff salaries £9100 Average % of staff time: animal-welfare (10%), animal-training (5%), animalrecords (5%) and nutrition (5%) officers

Transport costs for moves £3000 Costs based on number of moves over 10 year period

Keeper CPD and training £3000 Attendance of two keepers at each BIAZA EFG meeting (twice per year); additional elephant training schools as appropriate; in-house training costs

TAG costs £2800 Contribution to TAG research fund; ZSL staff attendance at EAZA and staff time on TAG

UK EWG £1000 plus £550 staff time Initial donation; ZSL staff as Chair of group / ZSL staff time as Co-Chair EFG (1 week per year)

AZA EFG £1500 ZSL staff time for Co-chair and research officer; cost of hosting EFG schools on rotational basis

Paddock maintenance £400"

 

Agree with these sentiments, but the figures seem very dodgy; 1640 mammal species? Are we banning rodents and bats from being mammals?

 

Never!

 

I agree but I didn't write the paper, there are currently 6,495 recognized species of mammals and of course that number is going up all the time as new species are discovered.