3 January 2025
London Zoo Annual Stocktake returns
Today (3 Jan 2025), zookeepers at London Zoo readied their clipboards, calculators and steady counting skills, as they began to count the animals at the Zoo’s annual stocktake.
Caring for more than 10,000 individual animals, London Zoo’s keepers face the challenging task of tallying up every mammal, bird, reptile and invertebrate at the Zoo – counting everything from a colony of inquisitive Humboldt penguins to Critically Endangered Asiatic lions.
Among the animals counted were the Zoo’s colony of 65 Humboldt penguins, including five new arrivals who will form important new breeding pairs in the Spring for the European breeding programme to conserve this vulnerable species.
In early 2024, London Zoo’s troop of critically endangered Western lowland gorillas welcomed the birth of two baby gorillas – Juno and Venus – marking a massive conservation success in its support of global population numbers. As keepers began the formal counting requirements for the primates, the two young gorillas were carried on the backs of their mothers, Mjukuu and Effie, and both young gorillas were accounted for in the stocktake’s tally.
2024 also saw important additions to the European Breeding Programme for Asiatic lions with the birth of three cubs – Mali, Syanii and Shanti; a massive conservation success for this Endangered species which, in the wild, is now only found in Gujarat’s Gir Forest.
This autumn, 53 tiny Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) Darwin’s frogs were brought to the conservation Zoo from Chile, as part of an effort to save the species from a deadly fungus. The arrival of adult UK-native medicinal leeches kick started a breeding programme at London Zoo to save this highly vulnerable species, while zookeepers were delighted to welcome Mzimu, a male okapi, to form a new breeding pair with female okapi Oni.
While counting large mammals is a relatively simple task, London Zoo’s diverse array of invertebrates must also be accounted for, including a new thriving hive of honeybees, which are easily counted as one to avoid counting dozens of moving busy bees.
A requirement of London Zoo’s zoological license, the annual stocktake takes keepers almost a week to fully complete and the information is shared with other zoos around the world via a database called ZIMS Species360, where it’s used to help manage the worldwide conservation breeding programmes for endangered animals.