The computer programs (and human yentas) that help America's zoo animals find love. Or at least make babies.
Via: facebook.com
Imagine that you're a river otter at the Oakland Zoo. Until recently, the chances that you would have babies was very slim. While a female otter, Ginger, came to the zoo in 2009, it took two years for her first set of pups to be born: before then, the Oakland Zoo had not seen a newborn river otter in its tanks in over a decade. This isn't rare in the captive-river-otter world: according to a San Francisco Chronicle story, only a handful were born in North America this past year. Also, otters don't give birth nearly as many times in their lifetime as fast-replicating creatures like, say, insects: the pregnancy period is unusually long — it takes months after mating for an embryo to lodge itself in the uterus and often a full year for birth to happen.
But last February, two river otter pups, Tallulah and Ahanu, beat the odds. Almost exactly a year later, three more pups were born. What happened? It wasn't a pair of Oakland otters hitting it off. Like so many of us nowadays, these otters' mom and dad met digitally.
Every animal born in an accredited zoo in the U.S. has a complicated data network behind it — from behavior to genetics to location, at least three different software applications track over 600 species. 55% of those species' populations are deemed "imperiled"—a fact that motivates the four full-time employees of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' Population Management Center (PMC) who manage digital "studbooks" and reproduction-info web pages for thousands of individual animals, ranging from lizards to tigers to birds to rhinos.
So it's like Match.com for animals? "Sort of," laughed Sarah Long, director of the Chicago-based PMC, "They don't have photos, though." Long has been overseeing the love lives (if you will) of the nation's zoo animals for the last decade. While historically zoos have been more about entertainment than science (and some argue that their existence is still basically immoral), their function has undergone great change in the past 30 years, in the process creating jobs like Long's.
Recognizing that many of the world's species are threatened by extinction, accredited American zoos banded together in 1981 to start a captive breeding program, the Species Survival Plan, that would treat the whole country like one big mating pool. Information was collected about pedigrees to discourage inbreeding. In 2000, the AZA opened up the PMC to oversee population programming. Building off of an original database that was, essentially, spreadsheets, the center has been has added "bells and whistles" over the past few years, like the aforementioned profile pages, to help expedite the process of matching mates.
Visualization options are the latest innovations of the new PMC software ("PMx"), released last year. Using techniques borrowed from insurance actuary tables, PMx can take information on average life expectancies and birth and infant mortality rates and create a demographic profile of breeds and individual animals. The weaker the results, the more incentive zoos have to breed their stock.
Once the need to breed has been established, pedigree data comes into play. "That's when 'Match.com' computer dating comes in. We'll look at who has the most valuable males and females and try to get them together as long as they are not related to each other," said Long.
Here's the animal equivalent of a profile picture: a screenshot of the family tree of an animal, identified through its ID number (#108) and its parents numbers (father is #18, mother is #40).
And then there are the pages that show every possible pairing within a breed, with possible positive or negative outcomes of genetic combinations.
