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Feeding the Animals at the Smithsonian's National Zoo
Poziom:
Temat: Sztuka i rozrywka
I'm Mike Maslanka. I'm the head of the Department
of Animal Nutrition
here at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and we're in the commissary
In the commissary our role is to make all
the diets for all the animals in the park every day.
A balanced diet contributes to our overall health
and a balanced diet contributes to the Zoo animals'
overall health
Where would go to the doctor, they go to the veterinarian.
Our mom makes us eat our leafy greens,
We make them eat their leafy greens.
All of our produce is restuarant grade.
And there is quite a variety of it. That's
everything from
the regular stand-by things like apples and
carrots
and sweet potatoes
to seasonal fruits that we might be able to get.
We're not talking about seconds. We're not talking
about anything that we wouldn't buy
at the grocery store ourselves.
So if it's not good enough for us to consume, then we don't
include it in the diets for the animals in the park.
We're currently feeding
2000 animals
Some 400 species
Basically we're responsible for delivering
the diets throughout the park all day.
Once the diets are loaded onto our vehicles
They end up going out of the park and are delivered
to the individual animal houses.
The keepers picked those diets up,
take them back into their buildings and distribute
them on exhibit
for the animals to come out and then forage.
When we're trying to determine what to feed an animal,
We're looking at the animals natural foraging
strategy,
we're looking at what it consumes in its natural
environment
and we're also looking at how we might be
able to best match that in the Zoo.
When we provide a variety of greens for the gorillas,
it is not only that the standard leafy greens that
you might might find the the grocery store
whether that be
romaine or iceberg lettuce, whatever the case may be,
It's also
kale and collard greens and dandelion greens.
So we see those animals forging in the morning
what we're actually seeing is
the exhibiting of some of their natural behaviors
as well as meeting their nutrient needs at the same time
As an example of
the role that nutrition plays in animal heath
We had received Nikki
the famous spectacled bear
into our collection.
But when he came in he was about 200
pounds overweight
What we did as the nutrition staff was try to
pull together a diet, very simialr to
what we'd do with humans,
in order to get that significant amount of
weight off of that animal.
And over time, with strict adherence to that
diet,
Nikki began to lose weight
and ended up at a condition
that we would expect
for spectacle bear of his age
and maturity.
Nikki is doing great he has been introduced
to Billy Jean, a female spectacle bear.
And it is sort of the culmination of the success
story
in that he not only has lost weight but we're hoping
that he becomes a reproductive
spectacle bear
and that he has offspring at the Zoo.
Once all the deliveries are done, everybody ends up
coming back to the commissary
and working ahead on
diet preparation on a variety of different
fronts, so that by the end of the day,
we have a complete set of diets for the next day.
365 days a year
that happens.
Animals eat all the time
and our main mission is
to provide those diets every day of the year
