London Zoo begins week-long annual stocktake counting more than 10,000 animals
Amongst the 400 species counted were Humboldt penguins, Asiatic lions and western lowland gorillas.
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.
“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.
“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.”
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.
