Zoo Story (13 page)

“She’s my cat,” Carie would say. “If she ever leaves, I’m leaving with her.”

Like the rest of the staff, she was closely following Enshalla’s and Eric’s courtship dance. She prayed that eventually Enshalla would warm to the young virgin and that together they would conceive a litter, thereby adding to the world’s dwindling number of Sumatran tigers. Even so, as a modern woman with modern notions, Carie took great satisfaction in Enshalla’s refusal to automatically concede to the male imperative. It made the keeper happy that many of the female animals she worked with dominated the males in their exhibits.

“All our girls are like that here,” said Carie, beaming.

Enshalla’s invincibility posed a threat to the future of her species. Feminism was a human invention, just like morality and ethics and the vegan principles espoused by the man who wanted to feed the tigers tofu. Nature was indifferent to the hopes embedded in these ideas. It unfolded outside our notions of progress, justice, right and wrong. If Enshalla was going to ever have a litter, it had to be soon. She had just turned thirteen and was approaching the end of her reproductive window. If she rejected Eric, how many more suitors could be brought before her? How many more chances did she realistically have? Like her species, she was running out of time.

Patrolling her territory, the queen circled quietly. She slinked past the rock walls that held her in and traced a path along the edge of the moat. In the water, her reflection moved with her—a shimmer of orange and black, disappearing.

Across the way,
the king was chasing his minders. It was a game they had played for years, and one of his favorites. The keepers would dash along the exterior of the high mesh wall at the back of the chimp exhibit, and from the other side, Herman would tear after them, laughing and nodding ecstatically.

The keepers loved it too. It made them happy to lure Herman away from another nap on his rock shelf and to see him so engaged and excited, running hard, showing a glimpse of youthful energy. To many staff members, Herman
was
Lowry Park. Waves of primate keepers had worked with him, and as they all came and went, he had always been there. Zoo-keeping tends to be a young person’s profession, and many of his current keepers had not been born when he first arrived. They could not picture Lowry Park without him. Still, they wondered how much longer he could hold on. Sooner or later, his heart had to give out, or another chimp would topple him from the throne.

At the moment, Herman had no rivals. There were still only two other males in the group. Bamboo was even older and slower than him and was relegated to such a lowly status in the hierarchy that the females sometimes felt at liberty to bully him. Alex, the adolescent male, looked up to Herman so much that he often imitated him, puffing himself up and rocking back and forth and acting as though he were in charge. But inside any chimp group, even a small and stable one like Herman’s, power is always fluid. Alliances shift. Secret deals are made. A new male, stronger and more ambitious, could be transferred from another zoo and take over, just as Chester had done before. Alex, growing fast, might look at Herman one day and gauge the slowness of his gait and decide it was time for a change.

It was hard to imagine what Herman would do then, what he would have left. If he were no longer the king, who would he be?

No need to worry about that right now. There were no threats on the horizon, no challengers looming. For the moment, Herman could while away whatever days he had left, indulging in the privileges of his position—flirting with pretty women, rolling in the dirt with Bamboo, sticking his long black leathery feet through the mesh of his den so his keepers could give him another pedicure. Sometimes, when the afternoon light turned amber and they summoned Herman inside for the night, the chimp ignored them. If he was especially stubborn, they asked one of his favorite blondes on staff—he was particularly enamored of a woman in the Asia department—to stand near the door and call his name. Ever hopeful, Herman would race toward her, running on all fours.

After so many years in this place, he had become a gray eminence. An old man at dusk, hanging on.

The burning heart of the day was always the most quiet. Hours passed when nothing happened, when a hush fell over the grounds and the sunbaked toddlers passed out in their strollers and all the other species seemed to have retreated into the shade to doze and dream. Then without warning, the spell would break and the zoo would explode back to life. In a flash, the animals were licking newborn babies clean or plotting a rival’s downfall or courting another sexual conquest—giving themselves over to lust, greed, rage, vanity, ambition, even something that might be called love. For a moment, the world would open and offer a glimpse into its logic and design, its random joys and casual cruelties.

That October, Virginia Edmonds and the other manatee keepers were still working around the clock to save Loo, the abandoned calf found in the Caloosahatchee River. He’d been having trouble adjusting to the formula. One Friday evening, Virginia was in the medical tank with Loo, feeding him with the bottle again, when the calf began to shake. He seemed to be seizing. Murphy was summoned, and a small oxygen mask was placed on Loo’s small gray face. But it was no good. A few minutes later, he died in Virginia’s arms.

After losing Buttonwood only a couple of months before, the other keepers were better prepared for Loo’s death. It hurt, seeing another calf slip away. But after eleven years at Lowry Park, they had learned to accept that some animals would die, no matter how much care they gave them.

“We have a lot of death, no matter what we do.”

A necropsy would be conducted to determine how Loo had died. Maybe the zoo would discover something that could help. Some kernel of insight that could improve the odds, ever so slightly, the next time an abandoned calf was brought to them and they held him in the cold water through the night.

Death was part
of the daily fabric. Mice disappeared down the digestive tracts of eagles. Bears got old and passed away. Squirrels made the fatal error of venturing into the chimp exhibit on a day when Rukiya and Twiggy felt like hunting.

Immersed in the everyday drama of so many species, the staff saw the cycles of life and death endlessly repeating. Sometimes the wheel turned so fast, it made them dizzy.

The keepers in the herps and aquatics department were grinning. One of their male sea horses had just given birth to a new brood.

A male, yes. The way it works with sea horses, the female deposits the eggs into a pouch on the male’s stomach. He fertilizes the eggs, then carries them in the pouch for two weeks. “Pregnant males,” they’re called. When the babies are big enough to swim, the male pushes them into the water.

“They’re good at birthing,” said Dan Costell, one of the herps keepers, pointing toward the tank where the sea horses were swimming.

Floating near their parents, the babies looked like specks of dirt. Viewed through a magnifying glass, though, they were revealed as tiny dragons, with blinking eyes and shivering dorsal fins and S-shaped bodies plated in crenellated armor from their coronets to the ends of their curving tails. More than a hundred of them had been born into this brood—not unusual for sea horses. They were wondrous creations, somehow both majestic and otherworldly, and in all likelihood, most of them would soon be dead. Sea horse babies have high mortality rates, sometimes 90 percent or more.

The prospect of their deaths did not weigh heavily on Dan or the rest of the herps staff. They accepted that this was the way of things for sea horses, and they knew that soon enough another pregnant male would hatch another huge brood. When biologists talk about reproductive strategies in the animal kingdom, they break it down into two categories of species. Some, known as K-selected species—usually larger mammals such as manatees or tigers or humans—produce only one or a few offspring at a time and then concentrate on rearing and protecting those handful of their young. If one dies, the loss can cut deep, both emotionally and genetically.

In the herps department, the calculus of life and death was figured differently. Most of the time, the staff worked with what are called r-selected species—fish, turtles, frogs, spiders, and other creatures that typically reproduce in greater number, with a much higher mortality rate and the parents devoting virtually no energy to the rearing of those young. Emotion is largely removed from the equation. Inequity abounds, at least by human standards. Some species of frogs, Dan explained one day, typically produce multiple clutches of eggs. The female lays the first clutch, then the male fertilizes them and carries them on his back toward a suitable hatching ground—someplace moist and warm and dark, such as a nutshell or a bromeliad leaf filled with rainwater. When the first clutch hatches into tadpoles, the female lays another clutch and delivers them, unfertilized, to the tadpoles to eat. The second clutch’s entire function, then, is to provide a meal for the first clutch. Those eggs are devoured before they ever get a chance to wiggle in the water.

“Whoever hatches first, wins,” said Dan.

In the herps department, where the animals were cold-blooded and the staff preferred them that way, sentimentality died quickly. It wasn’t that the herps keepers didn’t care about their animals. They were as devoted to the well-being of their geckos and marine toads as Lee Ann Rottman was to the chimps or as Carie Peterson was to the tigers. They just didn’t see the point in projecting human values onto life forms so utterly different.

The keepers had a running catalogue of stereotypes they deployed to mess with one another, depending on the kind of animals to which they were each assigned. Staffers who worked outside of the aviary joked about asocial misfits fixated on any species with wings and a beak: “those bird nerds.” Primate keepers were portrayed as hypersocial: nonstop talkers, slightly crazed, desperate for attention, and prone to extended outbursts of weeping—much like the chimps. The primate staff did not necessarily disagree with this assessment. In fact, a couple of them prided themselves on their talent for dramatic displays and epic banter.

The most withering jokes were reserved for the herps keepers, typically characterized as testosterone-laden freaks obsessed with species the rest of humanity despised. This was not entirely fair, since a couple of the herps keepers were women, seemingly well-adjusted, with nothing freakish about them. But when it came to Dan and his boss, Dustin Smith, the assistant curator in charge of the department, the stereotype was pretty much dead-on. Dustin and Dan—as they were invariably called, and always in the same breath—took boyish pleasure in the outlandish qualities of the species housed in their department, which included not just herps and aquatics but also large spiders and a lonely colony of naked mole rats, exiled in a back room while the zoo figured out where to display them.

Dustin gave lengthy discourses on inspecting the anal notches of turtles to determine their sex and on the virulence and variety of bacteria lurking inside the saliva of Komodo dragons. He talked about how male snakes have two penises, called hemipenes, and how the females have a cloaca, and how they mated side by side. When he gave behind-the-scenes tours of the herps building, he would escort visitors to the edge of the big tub that contained the naked mole rats and explain that although they were mammals, they lived in an underground hive like insects and were ruled by a queen.

“The wildest thing about them?” Dustin said. “When one member of the colony has a baby, every adult lactates, both male and female.”

He was fanatical about turtles and tortoises—if it had a shell on its back and lumbered, he was happy—and was always conniving to sneak more of both into exhibits. At the moment he was campaigning for the addition of some Aldabra giant tortoises, a massive species from the Seychelles, off the east coast of Africa. Amazing creatures, Aldabras have one of the longest life spans on the planet; reportedly, they can live for more than a century. Dustin was convinced that Safari Africa, the zoo’s soon-to-be-completed new wing, cried out for Aldabras. He had once worked with several of them. They had personalities; he swore it. They were always following him around, he said, waiting for him to hand over a banana.

“Like puppy dogs!”

Dustin was so persuasive he could almost convince you that a tortoise was the most fiendishly entertaining animal on Earth. Dan tended to be more quiet and was not as prone to the hard sell. He wondered aloud at the ability of snakes to move across deserts, over mountains, and across the seas, all without the aid of limbs. He marveled at the brutal efficiency of male tarantulas, who kill each other on sight to eliminate any potential rival. The herps department kept several tarantulas in one of the back rooms, including a goliath bird-eater, the biggest spider in the world, with legs that can span a dinner plate. As Dan spoke, he was feeding it a breakfast of crickets.

“They won’t eat their prey,” he explained, “unless it’s alive.”

His favorites were the poison-dart frogs peeping in the small room modeled after the rain forest. Dan was the minor god who held sway over the air and the earth of this miniature ecosystem, calibrating the misters and the thermostat and the lights to re-create the conditions the frogs would have been experiencing if they lived in the wild and not a closet in a zoo. He made sure their water was clean, that none of them showed signs of spindly leg, and that the room temperature never went below seventy-five degrees or above eighty-five. He was watching over several species of the dart frogs, including the powder blues. They were almost gone from their native Suriname, but for now their numbers in captivity were stable. He thought the world needed more and was encouraging the powder blues to breed. He had fashioned breeding huts for them—coconut shells where they could hide from the light. Usually he put two males in a tank with one female, so that the males would feel competitive and wrestle.

“They’ve got to do a little sparring to be in the mood,” Dan said.

When he found eggs in the breeding huts, he carefully gathered each clutch and tended to it inside a deli cup from Publix. He dreaded going on vacation because he worried some tadpoles would die while he was away.

Dan’s precision was a perfect match for his boss’s exuberance. He and Dustin were a team, united in their fascination with all that slithered and slunk. Once, when a Burmese python sank its jaws into Dan’s hand during a feeding and would not let go, it was Dustin who finally pried the snake off by wedging his Lowry Park ID badge into its mouth.

One of the things that made them such a memorable pair was their physical dissimilarity. Dan was a walking fortress, with a flat-top mohawk and bulging muscles and a Harley parked outside. A tattoo of a dart frog was emblazoned on his right arm, and a Komodo dragon coiled itself around his left, lashing its tongue. The tattoo artist who endowed him with the dragon had free-handed it during a marathon session. Under the needle for more than three hours, Dan had not even winced. He had once been a counselor for juvenile delinquents and also an amateur boxer; recently he had climbed into the ring in a Toughman Contest.

Dustin was short and slightly scrawny and looked as though he’d just escaped from the eighth grade. Although he was actually twenty-five, with a wife and a mortgage and a title, he had no trouble calling forth his inner adolescent. All day long, he messed with the other keepers. His standard greeting, when he passed them on the zoo’s back road, was to flash an “L” sign.

“Loser,” he would say, smirking.

Usually, they rolled their eyes. “Dustin—”

“Whatever,” he’d say, cutting them off.

Like the boy who waves snakes and spiders in front of girls to make them scream, he was not above placing an occasional centipede on someone’s arm. Not surprisingly, half of the women on staff had dedicated their lives to devising a suitable revenge. None had succeeded as consistently as his nemesis, who happened to be a female orangutan.

Dee Dee was known around the zoo for her general dislike of men and particular dislike of Dustin. He could not fathom why she hated him so much. As far as he could remember, Dee Dee was one of the few females whom he had never slighted. Perhaps, like Herman, she had a gift for reading people. For years now, whenever Dustin’s duties took him past the orang exhibit, Dee Dee had hurled her droppings at him. She had a good arm. One day, when he was zipping by in a golf cart, she calculated the velocity and movement and led her throw just enough for the bull’s-eye.

“Women,” he said afterward, shaking his head.

For all the abuse Dustin invited, he retained a scruffy appeal. Watching him counting the scutes on a turtle’s shell, it was easy to see the child who had preceded the adolescent, the waif who wandered the fields for hours, peering under every piece of rotted wood to see if he could catch another water moccasin, and who was allowed by his mother to bring home countless orphaned creatures, as long as they didn’t devour the family cat. The women at the zoo empathized with his wife. They assumed her patience was heroic.

Word had spread that she was pregnant with their first child. The idea gave pause even to his friends.

Dustin was spawning.

In spite of himself, he was held in great regard by the staff. It helped that he was brilliant and knew more about herps than seemed humanly possible. Also that he was possessed with that strangely winning passion for species almost nobody else wanted to touch. He recognized the depth of the bias his department was up against. Humankind had held a grudge against reptiles ever since the Garden of Eden. Even the chairman of Lowry Park’s board, Fassil Gabremariam, detested snakes. Once, when he stepped onto an elevator with one of the zoo’s keepers who happened to be carrying a ball python inside a small crate, Gabremariam had visibly shuddered and backed against the elevator wall, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the serpent.

Dustin could quote the studies that showed how little time most zoo visitors spent in front of every reptile exhibit. He knew that endangered mammals were much more likely to get attention and funding and protection than any toad on the edge of extinction. None of this lessened his fervor as a defender of downtrodden amphibians, maligned arachnids, anything that oozed or puffed a dewlap. To follow him through the zoo was to be regaled with a rapid-fire rant on the discrimination that plagued cold-blooded creatures.