I guess people who post exhibit pictures in each thread won't like you much after this change
I’m not sure that’s a problem. Maybe the range of relevant pictures increases a little, but I don’t think it’s meaningfully more difficult to collect images of, say, elephant, giraffe, lion, gorilla and mandrill enclosures than it is to dig up hyena, tiger, jaguar, otter and sloth bear ones.
Exciting!
What about zoos like Chester with virtually no North American animals? That would be pretty hard on them... Almost all of the zoos in the cup have South American, African and Asian areas, with most having Oceanian areas, but very few European zoos have comprehensive North American zones and vice versa... (in fact I don't know of any North American zoos with European zones, probably because the fauna involved is very similar, just smaller in Europe...
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On it.
There’s one big difference to how a group focused on geographic, rather than taxonomic categories will work. While there are seven continents (at least as conventionally understood - Europe isn’t really separate from Asia other than politically, but I digress), I’ve spent the last little while thinking about how those potential categories function in the game and have concluded only five will really work:
- Africa and Asia are pretty self-explanatory.
- Central America fits better with South, not North America based on the types of species that live there, so the third category is ‘South and Central America’. Caribbean islands also belong here.
- North America and Europe, as Amur Leopard notes, aren’t categories that often cross the pond. A European zoo drawing ‘Europe’ against an American zoo will win by default, and vice-versa. Luckily, the species line-ups are broadly similar so North America and Europe will form a combined category, allowing zoos from both continents to be meaningfully compared.
- Australia, eccentric as we are, forms only a marginal component of most overseas zoos. To ensure there’s plenty to talk about, I’m creating a more or less artificial category combining Australia, Antarctica and ‘Island endemics’. Species from Madagascar, oceanic islands, New Zealand and Indonesia east of the Wallace Line - essentially, all the places where evolution got a little wacky - will all fit here.
I’ve gone back and forth a little on how to treat large, recently-formed islands such as Sri Lanka, Sumatra, Borneo, Java and Japan: I initially wanted to treat them as fitting into both of Asia *and* the island category, but I’ve ultimately landed on assigning them to one or the other: hence they don’t appear on the list above. The same applies in reverse: Madagascar, for instance, does not form part of Africa. Sorry Zurich, but Masoala only counts once.
I won’t claim my knowledge of geography is perfect enough to make all of these calls in advance, but as a general guide qualifying for this category requires that fauna on the island in question differs significantly from the nearest continent.
One last note. Because there are only five categories, not six, the first two matches in each group will share one category: after that, the other four categories will each appear once.
