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Five Asiatic lions, seven western lowland gorillas, three reticulated giraffes, 53 Darwin’s frogs, 65 Humboldt penguins…it’s been a busy day at London Zoo as our zookeepers have begun the mammoth task of counting every animal for our annual stocktake, a headcount of every animal in our care.
I hope it goes without saying that we count our animals every day, so there are no surprises on stocktake day. Despite that, each January our animals are tallied up in the annual census, marking an official date to record our animal numbers and submit them to our local council as one of the conditions for our license.
For some zookeepers the job is an easy one – it’s not so hard to count three giraffes, but the primate keepers have to use ingenious tactics to get a troop of monkeys in one place and still for a headcount. While it may seem that the invertebrate keepers have it tough, they get to use a cheat tactic – hive animals like our leaf-cutter ants and honeybees are counted as a single colony, saving keepers the painstaking task of identifying individual insects, where this hack won’t work, they’ll take a photo and count the still image.
As well as recording how many tigers, tortoises or titi monkeys are in our care, it’s also a chance to ensure our records on an international zoo database called Species360, are up to date and accurate. This helps us – as a global community of good zoos – to collectively manage the conservation breeding programmes for the animals in our care.
Good zoos contribute to the conservation of endangered species in many ways, not least by educating the millions of visitors that come through our gates each year, but one hugely important role is boosting the numbers of endangered species to create insurance populations – as a back up to their vulnerable wild populations.
Few of the visitors to London Zoo will know they are yards away from a big tech facility dedicated to monitoring wildlife around the world
The individual conservation breeding programmes are managed by species specialists in zoos across Europe and beyond, and much like an online dating app, help to identify potential mates for animals. Unlike online dating apps though, they not only consider compatibility in terms of ages and preferences, but factor in their genetic lineage to ensure the animals being cared for in zoos are genetically diverse and healthy.
Knowing exactly how many animals are in a breeding programme is crucial to their management – much like knowing how many of their wild counterparts exist helps us deliver global conservation plans to protect them. Here at ZSL – the conservation charity which runs London Zoo – population counts are a vital tool in our armoury, from our annual seal survey in the Thames to our involvement in tiger counts in Nepal. Understanding wildlife numbers helps us prioritise our work, from habitat restoration to training local conservationists.
That’s why we track over 30,000 wildlife populations around the world, covering 5,000 species. We use this data to create the Living Planet Index each year, which told us that those populations have gone down by 73% since 1970. Even more shockingly the figure for Latin America and the Caribbean is 95% – for every 20 animals counted in fifty years ago, we are counting one today.
Last year, to help this work we installed a £2m supercomputer in our scientific institute. It will help us crunch data, including from satellites, digital cameras and acoustic sensors on land and in the ocean. Few of the visitors to London Zoo will know they are yards away from a big tech facility dedicated to monitoring wildlife around the world.
All of which means that – while it’s easy to count four Sumatran tigers or seven western lowland gorillas – the annual animal count at London Zoo isn’t just a photo-op and a quick head count. It’s part of our global efforts to protect endangered species, alongside literally hundreds of partners around the world.
Matthew Gould is CEO of ZSL
