How Heavy Is Frank the Meerkat? London Zoo Weighs Its 14,000 Animals.

The London Zoo, which has greater than 14,000 animals, performed its annual weigh-in this week, an occasion that helps preserve information on their well being and different knowledge up-to-date and measures the animals’ effectively being.

While zookeepers measure the animals all year long, each August they double-check all the data and invite news organizations to take a look.

“Having this data helps to ensure that every animal we care for is healthy, eating well, and growing at the rate they should,” Angela Ryan, the London Zoo’s head of zoological operations, stated in a press release. “We record the vital statistics of every animal at the zoo — from the tallest giraffe to the tiniest tadpole.”

The zoo’s heaviest animal is Maggie, a giraffe, who is available in round 750 kilograms (about 1,653 kilos). Maggie lives together with her sister, Molly, and was joined by one other giraffe, Nuru, in March.

The zoo’s smallest animal is a leaf cutter ant, at about 5 milligrams. Zookeepers don’t measure every ant individually, however use estimates primarily based on the load of a whole colony.

“We can tell a lot from an animal by its weight,” Ms. Ryan instructed a London radio station. The weigh-in can even measure how pregnant animals are doing, and may alert zookeepers to new pregnancies, which in flip helps with making ready for any births.

Zookeepers add the measurements and weights to the Zoological Information Management System, a database that’s shared with different zoos world wide that features details about threatened species. Conservationists within the wild can even use the data to find out the age of a selected endangered animal, for instance.

Weighing animals could be difficult. Zookeepers use alternative ways to get them to step — or hop, skip or soar — onto the dimensions and arise straight for measurements.

This yr, for instance, the zookeepers tricked Humboldt penguin chicks into strolling over scales one after the other by having them line up for his or her morning feed, the zoo stated. It took the promise of tasty treats to get some Bolivian black-capped squirrel monkeys onto the scales.