PLACEMENT!
Tavishi
Whoops, it's been almost a month since I posted... I swear, this will not become a habit, the month of April was just hectic.
I spent the first two weeks of April in Boston and Stickney, two small towns in Lincolnshire. I was staying in Boston, and doing a zoo placement in Stickney, which is like 8 miles from Boston.
Anyways, I was doing a placement at Ark Wildlife Park! I want to pursue a career in wildlife conservation medicine (Wild Kratts maxing), and this work experience taught me so much about not only their animals, but what it's like to work with wildlife in captivity.
Ark Wildlife Park has a variety of creatures, most of which are rescues, surrenders, or just gifts from other zoos. It's an animal sanctuary more than just a zoo.
Sidebar 1 : this isn't to say I don't love zoos. I love ethical zoos. I think anyone who works in conservation who doesn't like zoos point blank has a very narrow and naive view on how animal care works. Zoos play such an important role in public education, animal rehabilitation, and conservation of endangered species.
Anyways, but more about Ark and the animals I worked with!
Ark has a wide variety of wild cats, including a Eurasian lynx, a serval, caracals, bobcats, Scottish wildcats, jungle cats, Chausie cats, and a savannah cat. A common misconception is that any large cat that isn't a house cat is a big cat- instead, big cat is its own qualification, and the rest remain wildcats.
The most notable difference between big cats and wildcats is that big cats are capable of roaring, because of the presence of just the stylohyoid ligament in their larynx, whereas most cats have a bone called the epihyal embedded in that ligament. A notable exception is the cheetah, which just purrs. Big cats include: leopards, snow leopards, cougars, lions, tigers, cheetahs, and jaguars.
My favorites of the cats at Ark was the serval Anubis and the Eurasian lynx Echo! Servals are really cool, and are known for having a freakishly long neck and insane jumping capabilities. They also have disproportionately large ears. If they were a pinniped species, I feel like they'd be a Weddell seal by virtue of intensely strange proportions (weddell seals are like freakishly long.) Ark Wildlife Park's serval was a former pet, actually. In the UK, it is legal to keep servals with a license. Anubis got handed over to Ark after his previous owners broke the terms of their license. Anyways, now he spends his days being very bad at hunting but thoroughly enriched and a little bit silly.
Ark is also where I learned that the UK has a native species of wild cat: the Scottish wildcat! Scottish wildcats kind of just look like perpetually pissed off tabby cats. There are very few pure Scottish wildcats in the wild, because most are actually hybridised with domestic cats. The Scottish wildcat is actually considered critically endangered, and because of that, there are a variety of breeding programs for them in British zoos and aquariums (LIKE ARK WILDLIFE PARK!).
Speaking of hybridisiation, Ark also has hybridised jungle cats (called Chausie cats) and a very, very vocal savanna cat named Flerken (hybrid serval and domestic cat). While these hybridisations are very popular in the exotic and wild pet trade, as its thought to make them easier to care for, it's actually bad for their health.
Also it's not very ethical, as the breeding of a domestic and wild cat generally ends in death for the domestic cat.
Sidebar 2: In general, I'm not a big fan of artificial selection for novelty. I know a lot of people who are really into certain breeds of dogs and cats, but I don't think I could ever personally seek out a breeder for this sort of thing while animal shelters are so flooded. I've heard quite a few good arguments for working dogs, but ah well.
Anyways, savannah cats are especially at risk for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, progressive retinal atrophy, and pyruvate kinase deficiency. PKD, or pyruvate kinase deficiency, is a condition found where the enzyme pyruvate kinase is lacking. PK is crucial for the last step of glycolysis, and is encoded by two genes: PKLR and PKM2. PKLR encodes PK in the liver and red blood cells, whereas PKM2 encodes PK in muscle. In PKD, SNPs, or single nucleotide polymorphisms, are most commonly on PKLR.
My favorite animal at Ark was their Asian small clawed otter Indigo, who was genuinely one of the most adorable creatures of all time. Oh my GOD, she was so cute. I've unironically thought about her at least once every day since leaving.
I LOVE otters. I do think pinnipeds are undoubtedly better, but otters are so, so cute. Sea otters can be. a little brutal sometimes, but they're still cute. They've got so much dexterity and so much cute little face and little paws and wonder and whimsy in their eyes. She made little squeaks and it was incredible, and for some reason, she'd set her heart on climbing into my wellies and my jumper.
Also, their reptile collection is incredible. They've got my dream lizard, the blue-tongued skink. They're not uncommon pets, but they are really cool. They have a Yemen chameleon named Karma, who apparently no longer likes people, a kenyan sand boa, a green iguana named Ketchup who is decidedly not green, and two sudan plated lizards. They do have a tonne of other reptiles, these are just some of my favorites.
Also, they have a European legless lizard! Legless lizards are cool, because you hear that, and think that's just a snake. Well.
They were lizards with legs who evolved to lose their legs, rather than snakes. Snakes also technically used to be lizards who lost their legs, but they lost their legs a much longer time ago. Legless lizards are much more closely related to normal lizards than snakes, with more morphology in common with lizards than snakes. For one, they have eyelids, and a much larger tail:body ratio (fun fact: you can in fact determine where snake ends and tail begins), in comparison to snakes! Also, they have a notched tongue, not a forked tongue.
Other cool animals there were their red and arctic foxes. They have three red foxes, of which, two are not actually red. Their only red-in-color-red-fox is never out because she's shy (I saw her three times though!). While Dexter and Lana decidedly do not look like the typical red foxes, it's not because they are a different species- rather, they have genetic differences. Dexter is a melanistic red fox, making him kinda grey and smoky, whereas Lana is pure white and leucistic. Lana does have normal eyes, which makes her not albino. Whereas albino animals lack any pigment cells (neural crest cells WHO!!), leucistic animals are just like a milder albino.
I also went up to Skegness Natureland, which is a seal sanctuary in the town of Skegness (holy OBVIOUS). I was very happy to see pinnipeds, but I was a little disappointed in the rehabilitation centre. They kept their pups in a small pool with little separation from the public, which is a significant issue considering they are meant to release these pups back into the wild. The seals were obviously stressed out by their environment, and the proximity of humans nearby. However, their enclosure for their adult permanent residents was markedly better.
But yeah, placement was great! I would yap on forever, but I fear I've reached the point where attention spans stop working, so here's just a collage of photos:
see u on the creature trail...
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