Time to Take Stock

ZSL London Zoo Annual Count

PIX FOR SYNDICATION: Armed with clipboards, calculators and cameras, Zookeepers at ZSL London Zoo welcomed in the New Year today, as they started the annual animal stocktake.

ZSL London Zoo’s keepers face the challenge of counting every mammal, bird, reptile, fish and invertebrate, where more than 750 different species are cared for.

Zookeeper Collette Gibbings had the unenviable task of tallying up 400 moon jellyfish – all of which were constantly on the move, Jessica Jones had to contend with some very nosey llamas while noting down the animals in her care and zookeeper Marcel McKinley took note of the Zoo’s lively troop of 13 ring-tail lemurs as they enjoyed their breakfast.

2015 saw the arrival of many new animals at ZSL London Zoo, from the world’s first zoo-bred Lake Oku clawed frogs, to a lively litter of eleven African hunting dog puppies.  Adding to those was the birth of Edward the two-toed sloth and Gernot, the Western-lowland gorilla – all of which will have to be included on the 2016 census.

While for some keepers the task is as simple as ‘one, two, three’, imaginative tactics are used by others to ensure every critter is accounted for.  Aquarium keepers take a photo of the tanks and use still images to avoid counting the same fish twice, while at Penguin Beach keepers wait for the birds to line up at feeding time to do their headcount.

A requirement of ZSL London Zoo’s license, the annual audit takes keepers a week to complete and all of the information is shared with zoos around the world via theInternational Species Information System, where it’s used to manage the worldwide breeding programmes for endangered animals.

Photograhy: Daniel Sprawson