How zoos decide which animals are popular?

J

Jurek7

Well-Known Member
15+ year member
This topic comes around. How real life zoos decide they need a popular ABC animal and determine what will be the next attraction? I often see new exhibits for supposedly attractive animals where visitors don't stop.

I also noticed that some animals look good on photos, but in real life visitors don't stop that much at their ehxibits, unless the zoos especially builds hype about their exhibit or offers contact sessions. For example white tigers don't seem to attract more visitor attention than regular tigers.Whichever cat is active, visitors watch it. The opposite are animals where visitors will always stop - it seems sealions, a large group of monkeys or a silverback gorilla are like this.
 
Theres been a fair bit of research into this, and it pretty much all comes back to 4 factors
1. Big animals, if an animal is big (size wise), people will stop and watch it, this covers your elephants, giraffes, and silverback gorillas etc...
2. Active, people love to interact with animals even if it's through the glass, therefore they will always stop for playful and active animals like monkeys, pinnipeds and moving big cats and even moving snakes.
3. Advertising, if a zoo is well known for having a species or a certain animal, and they always post about it and build the hype, people will stop for that.
4. Pretty, this ones pretty self-explanatory, people love anything shiney, vibrant or colourful

Hope this clears it up
 
I meant something a bit different. How the real world zoos decide what to keep next? For example, whether the next exhibit would be tigers or giraffe? Both are popular. Humboldt penguins or ring-tailed lemurs? Orangutans or a sealion pool?

Thinking about this, from the perspective of a zoo, it is a costly investment. And also important for conservation in the sense that some threatened species can disappear from zoos if too many zoos consider them not popular enough. But sometimes the choice looks a bit random.
 
I think that zoos looked at the available layout and see what they can do with it, crafting a masterplan as well, realizing the ideas to make. The "popular" animals just comes along with the idea.

They can also go on and update or refurbish the severely needed update for the enclosures of their popular zoo animals, like Memphis did to their old hippo exhibit. Its really mostly up to the zoos to realize their plans, which can probably go as far as the next 50 years.
 
I think some zoo managers, especially those in marketing teams, know little about animals and think that visitors will prefer to see animals the managers like, without needing to provide any audio-visual material to interest visitors in animals they don't know about. I agree that visitors tend to prefer active animals but I remember lots of visitors looking at a sleeping giant panda that may just as well have been a black-and-white cushion
 
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