Cute footage shows penguins, capybaras and lemurs being weighed at zoo

LondonWorld

Cute footage shows penguins, capybaras, giant tortoises and more being weighed in an annual zoo tradition.   Giant Galapagos tortoises, Humboldt penguins, ring-tail lemurs, giant katydids, and magnolia land snails can all be seen on the scales after a weigh in at London Zoo today (August 19).  The famous zoo regularly weighs and measures their animals to monitor their health and to identify pregnancies.

Transcript

00:00Today is the annual weigh-in here at London Zoo, a monumental task. This is going to take us

00:05all day. We'll be weighing amongst other things the capybara, the penguins and the three Galapagos

00:12giant tortoises. So a lot of work ahead of us today. Now the reality is we actually weigh the

00:16animals almost every single day but today's a slightly more formalized process where we look

00:22to weigh as many of our more than 10 000 animals across over 400 species as we can and log everything

00:29onto an international database called ZIMS, a Zoological Information Management System. We then

00:34share that information with other zoos globally and with other conservation organizations. It's

00:39really important for us to monitor the weights of all our animals. For example just their general

00:46health and well-being is evident through their weight. We might have a pregnant animal that we

00:50want to be gaining weight through the process of our pregnancy, a juvenile that we want to be sure

00:56is growing at the right pace and indeed a geriatric animal towards the latter part of its life that we

01:01want to make sure is maintaining weight as much as possible. So lots of reasons for us to do it but

01:06then also critically as a conservation organization we can share that data with so many of our staff

01:13overseas working on some projects for critically endangered species. They're able to learn so much

01:19from that data that we gather here as a scientific organization and make sure that we do everything we

01:24can to protect both those habitats and also the wild cousins of the animals that you see here at the zoo.

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