The San Diego Zoo offers student fellowships each summer to help undergraduates, recent graduates, and graduate students gain research experience. The Fellows enjoy doing research outside of the university without having to juggle classwork on the side!

“One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.”

Unlike Dr. Seuss’s mythical story, I count real animals. Some of them, though, do look a bit strange! My name is Blair and I am joining the San Diego Zoo this summer as an intern in the Behavioral Biology Division. I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, this spring with a B.A. in biological anthropology. While at Washington University, I served as an intern at the Saint Louis Zoo and worked closely with the research staff there on a behavioral study in which we compared the reproductive behavior of the Somali wild ass and Grevy’s zebra.

This summer, I will continue my involvement with ungulates as I join Research Coordinator Caroline Pitt in the East Africa habitat at the Wild Animal Park. In addition to assisting Caroline with her current study of the Nile lechwe herd, I will be conducting frequent scans of the entire 60-acre (24-hectare) exhibit and recording where each animal is at different times throughout the morning. As you can imagine, scanning 60 acres of hills and valleys is no quick task! To locate all the animals, we spend 20 to 30 minutes driving through the exhibit, stopping frequently to count and identify animals as well as to check nooks and crannies for hidden animals. Sitatungas are especially fond of crawling into cool drainage pipes during the hotter parts of the day!

The information gathered in this study will have many useful applications. For example, the keepers and veterinary staff at the Wild Animal Park will find it useful to know where certain animals can typically be found during a certain time of day so that they can be easily located for veterinary procedures and other tasks. For other zoos interested in constructing mixed species exhibits, we may be able to shed light on which species like to hang out together and which ones space themselves out. Animals that don’t tend to occupy the same section of the exhibit may not work as well together in a smaller enclosure. In addition, we can attempt to determine why certain animals like certain areas. Do they hang out on top of the hills because there’s a nice breeze? Do they simply congregate where there are full feeders? Hopefully, we’ll find out!

Check back later this summer for an update on my progress, and if you visit the Wild Animal Park in the morning, try and spot Caroline and me in our very dirty white research truck in the East African exhibit!

Blair Roberts is a Weedon Summer Student Fellow in the Behavioral Biology Division at the San Diego Zoo.

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