Staff at London Zoo readied their clipboards and calculators on Friday as they began to count more than 10,000 animals during the annual stocktake.
The stocktake is a requirement of the zoo’s annual licence and will take the zookeepers almost a week to complete.
Among the animals to be counted are a colony of 65 Humboldt penguins and a troop of critically endangered western lowland gorillas.
“The reality is we always know how many animals we have at the zoo. We count them every day but this is a formal process we do every year,” Dan Simmonds, zoological operations manager, told the PA news agency.
“We register all of the results on an international database called Zims and we also register with our local licensing authority.
“The numbers have gone up slightly. The total number we don’t know yet as we’re still counting but it will be approximately 10,000 and the total number of species will be more than 400.”
New additions to the zoo in 2024 include three new Asiatic lion cubs, Mali, Syanii and Shanti, and two baby western lowland gorillas, Juno and Venus.
Some 53 tiny Darwin’s frogs also arrived from Chile in autumn, as part of an effort to save the species from a deadly fungus.
Zookeepers were also delighted to welcome Mzimu, a male okapi, to form a new breeding pair with female okapi Oni.
Once all creatures have been recorded, the information will also be shared with zoos around the world as part of the ongoing effort to manage worldwide conservation breeding programmes for endangered animals.
