Zoo InternQuest is a seven-week career exploration program for San Diego County high school juniors and seniors. Students have the unique opportunity to meet professionals working for the San Diego Zoo, Safari Park, and Institute for Conservation Research, learn about their jobs, and then blog about their experience online. Follow their adventures here on the Zoo’s website!
At the San Diego Zoo, ensuring all of their animal inhabitants are kept healthy and happy is a top priority! A major component in doing this is making sure that the animals are given the best and most nutritious diet that the Zoo can offer. This is where the Zoo’s nutritionist team steps in: Dr. Katie Kerr, Associate Nutritionist, and Ms. Deborah Lowe, Nutritionist Service Supervisor, are some of the people who you can find developing and preparing meals in the Zoo’s Forage Warehouse. Dr. Kerr creates the diets for the different animals at the Zoo ensuring they are getting the nutrition that they need every day. Ms. Lowe is in charge of preparing Dr. Kerr’s diets. In the Forage Warehouse, one of the original buildings of the Zoo, a wide variety of nutrition items for the animals are stored and prepared.
Each animal has specific dietary and nutritional requirements, and each animal’s specific diet is planned in advance. Dr. Kerr comes up with the diets for all the animals, making sure that she considers the nutritional needs of each species. This is why Dr. Kerr loves her job so much: there is such a large amount of creativity needed to formulate diets and solve nutritional conundrums. Luckily, there are about two hundred different inventory items in the Forage Warehouse that can be used to create diets for the animals.
Once Dr. Kerr has created a diet for an animal, Ms. Lowe and her team help assemble and deliver them to the different animal areas around the Zoo. She ensures that the diets her and her team have prepared are delivered to the Zoo’s different strings – team who work with specific sets of animals throughout the Zoo. Since there are such a wide variety of species at the Zoo, there are different areas of the Forage Warehouse where items for specific diets can be found. For example, meals for primates may get most of their food items from the thirty-degree Fahrenheit produce refrigerator – which is stocked to the brim with fresh human-grade fruits and vegetables like grapes, heads of lettuce and papayas. Carnivorous animals’ meals come from the freezer adjacent to the produce fridge to avoid any cross contamination. However refrigerated items are not the only thing that Debbie and her team pull from when preparing meals. There are also a wide variety of seeds, pellets, grains, and hays that are used in animals’ diets. The Zoo uses a few live foods as well, such as insects and mice, for some of their prey-eating animals.
Creating and preparing the Zoo’s meals aren’t the only things that Dr. Kerr and Ms. Lowe must worry about! Making sure that there is enough food to go around is also a vital component of the nutrition teams’ duties. Each week, the Forage Warehouse goes through about 8,000 pounds of produce, receiving four shipments of it weekly. Birds alone consume 240 pounds of fresh fruit and about 200,000 insects weekly! Though the animals of the Zoo consume the majority of all the food that is given to them, there will always be bits and pieces that aren’t consumed. Minimalizing food waste is also something which Dr. Katie and Ms. Lowe work to do. Leftover food scraps are taken to be consumed by the Zoo’s resident composting worms, and hay that is swept up off the floor is bagged up to be used as bedding for different inhabitants.
Nutrition is at the heart of the Zoo and all it does. Proper nutrition ensures that the creatures are able to fight disease, reproduce, and look and feel their best! The Nutrition Department helps to keep the Zoo’s inhabitants in tip top shape, allowing the animals to do what they do best – educate the public on their species and its conservation!
Alana Hurd, Real World Team
Week One, Winter Session 2019
