Week Eleven: November 3 - 9

Monday was another day in the sweatshop. We managed to get L's bobbin threader working, since apparently the Singer Centaur line has self-winding bobbins, so we were able to make some good progress on the mesocosms!

Tuesday was the election. It was... a bit stressful. I spent most of the day trying not to think about it, since I mailed in my ballot weeks ago.

Wednesday morning was also a bit rough, but I got to help the Mountain Vista Governor's School biology seniors sort out their bug samples from the Sustainability Matters landfill restoration. It was nice to see my former teacher and the next batch of MVGS graduates! And I found a very cute little weevil that looked like it was trying to be a roly-poly.

We spent the rest of the morning in the woods at Shenandoah, because our tour of the SCBI facilities got cancelled and a few things got rescheduled. I found a nice log by a stream and got to do some sketches.

The afternoon was the start of our unit on ex-situ conservation and zoo work! We talked a lot about the importance of creating and maintaining stable populations within zoos for long-term conservation, and how the genetics aspect of that becomes increasingly tricky as you have fewer and fewer individuals to work with.

Thursday was our journal club, discussing a paper that talked mostly about the idea of a 'promise list' for zoos - the idea of creating a universal list of certain species which zoos should guarantee the conservation of over the next 100 years. Personally, I think the concept is a little silly in isolation from other conservation work, and I think that trying to actually implement it would be a logistical nightmare. There's no good way to pick which species do or don't 'deserve' conservation, and there's already plenty of other lists covering similar topics for zoos.

After that, we got to meet with Mike Maslanka, the head of the Dept of Nutrition Science for SNZP. He gave a super interesting talk about small population collection management and all the different aspects of that, from working with other zoos (and sometimes non-zoo animal collections) to keeping the animals happy and healthy. He's been working in this field for a really long time - and, as he kept saying, he's retiring soon, so this is about to be our problem instead - and had some neat insights into the zoo side of things. It's thanks to him that the National Zoo does carcass feedings for their predators!

In the afternoon, we talked about species acquisition as the lead-in to our next project. We'll be going through the steps of proposing a new species to add to the collection at SCBI and then planning its enclosure to accomodate various needs, both for the animals and the people who will need to work with them. I'm planning to suggest the African Painted Dog, because I love them.

Friday was our trip to the zoo! It was an early start to the day, but it was all totally worth it. We got to go behind the scenes at the commissary (sadly, Mike wasn't there) and see all the food prep they do for the various critters, then we met with one of the keepers at the reptile house and saw their salamander lab! After that, we were let loose to roam, and I did my obligatory visit to the small mammal house to see my one true love: the naked mole rats. It was a super nice day, so the big cats were all out and about as well, which was very nice! It was a different perspective to be looking at all the exhibit designs and thinking about them from not just the visitor side, but from the perspective of the keepers, the vets, any scientists who might need to access the areas... There's a lot of thought and work that goes into all of that!