One of the Easter holiday missions was to reach our target of 100 species in the mini-zoo. Our exotics supplier, Exotics at Heart, unfortunately didn't have our Scorpion in time and our Feather-duster worm in the reef tank is currently laying on the bottom of the tank outside its tube so we might be one species down there too, so currently we are stuck on 98 species. We could have just bought any random two species today but really want something iconic for number 100, like a Scorpion so will have to wait and hopefully everything else stays alive. We are doing pretty well (I think)- we've had a 82% success rate of animals we've introduced into our controlled environments over the last year (a Paludarium, Reef tank, a new Invertebrate tank and a Gecko tank) and the Paludarium is increasingly bioactive (a self sustaining environment) with breeding cichlids (we have about 30 Convict Cichlid fry at the moment).
Zoological nature conservation (keeping wildlife in zoos/controlled environments) is sometimes a controversial subject but is certainly one aspect of biodiversity and nature conservation. Seems to make sense in a rapidly disappearing natural (outside human management) world to integrate the human environment closer with animals and plants (pets and houseplants and gardens etc) and to contemplate where do we actually draw the lines between 1) habituating wild birds and animals and making them dependent on human created environments like gardens, parks, engineered nature reserves and farmland and 2) breeding in the eaves. lofts,, walls and inside (house mice and spiders etc) of our dwellings and 3) the full domestication of wildlife (pets, zoos and collections) especially when non-native domesticated wildlife becomes naturalised in the wider environment (through escaping) and furthermore especially in the context of the modern craze of the deliberate introduction and re-introduction of domesticated wildlife back into the more natural environment.
It's all just a spectrum in the inescapable reality of the Anthropocene - the whole planet is becoming a human controlled environment and there is no other creature that we imprison in 'cages' and have such profound impact on it's natural behaviour than... ourselves. Keeping animals is a great way of developing some empathy of how global human elites manage non-elite human societies too, we really do 'farm' and 'keep' each other and sometimes in the most awful conditions- plenty of tower blocks are not much different to battery farms. I've been trying to teach Jacob the difference between intensively farmed humans (those that work in corporations and live in housing estates), free range humans (those who work in charities, civil service and other cushy numbers and come home to a nice suburb coop at night) and wild humans (hippies) and the difference between farmers and keepers (billionaires) and livestock and pets (everyone else). It's a great way of helping kids understand the tough decisions that human leaders have to make when managing any population of living organisms and the consequences of over feeding them and under feeding them, vaccinating or not vaccinating them or not getting the environmental conditions right and just neglecting them for a bit and the horrors that result in that. A walk down the aisles of Asda today revealed a few of those horrors.
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