London zoo animal count - 13th January 2023

Every year, the London Zoo counts all its animals. It’s called a stocktake.

The world famous zoo has a total of 14,000 animals, but more arrive each year. London Zoo’s animal population’s growing.

Manager Dan Simmonds talks about the new animals.

Dan Simmonds: 'Probably the star of the show has been our western lowland gorilla, silverback gorilla, Kiburi, who's been introduced to our resident gorillas here and is doing incredibly well. We had two tiger cubs, we had 10 Humboldt penguins, some of which were actually hand-reared by keepers here. So, generally it's been a really exciting time at the zoo and numbers growing.'

It's very important to complete the count of all the animals. The zookeepers need to count big mammals like gorillas, small amphibians like frogs and fish which move around a lot. The zookeepers have to use creative methods to count some animals. They count each fish by taking photos of them, and they count each ant colony, not each ant.

With other animals like the squirrel monkeys and penguins, they try to use training and prizes to count them. Stocktaking’s important for working with other zoos as Dan Simmonds explains.

Dan Simmonds: 'So it's really important that we keep a accurate record of all the animals that we have here at the zoo. We record that onto something that's called ZIMS - Zoological Information Management System - and we share that globally with all of the zoos that we cooperate with around the whole world. And that's a really important part of the management of our captive breeding programs.'

The stocktake helps keepers get to know the new animals and to record any new animal births. That way, London Zoo can plan extra living space for them.