It’s a great question! Zoos get different parts of their diets from all over – and often, parts of what they feed out will come directly from the local community!
The foundation of what most zoo animals eat is actually commercially produced diets. Just like you can go pick up a bag of dog food, you can order nutritionally complete biscuits for herbivores or logs of ground meat for the carnivores. There’s actually a super wide range of different options: you can find banana-flavored gel diets for primates that help increase liquid consumption, pelleted food for birds that are highly sensitive to iron content, and even powdered meals for sharks and crocodilians that can be reconstituted with water in case they’re sick and need to be tube-fed. The same companies also make vitamins and supplements in appropriate doses for various exotic animal species. Zoos will buy fish and frozen feeder animals (such as rats or chicks for snakes) in bulk from commercial distributors.
Past those basics, it starts to vary! A lot of facilities do try to grow at least some of their own food, although they don’t do it actually in the animal exhibits simply because the plants would get chewed on / dug up / messed with long before the produce could finish growing. What zoos grow can range from some herbs in a small enrichment garden to all the hay the entire animal collection needs each year.
A lot of zoos get the browse (leafy forage) for elephants and other herbivores from partnerships with their city or local tree-trimming companies! They’ll separate out and collect limbs pruned off of the specific tree species the animals like, and bring them directly to the zoo. Bamboo for pandas is often also sourced from the community: zoos will have relationships with places like golf courses that have huge stands of bamboo for aesthetic purposes, and they’ll rotate which places they take cuttings from so that no area is over-pruned at any one time.
Local butchers are absolutely part of sourcing zoo diets! They’re the best place to get raw bones for carnivores (and those are more than just treats – meaty bones are fed out on “fast days” for species like large felids). Sometimes restaurants will donate unused meat for zoo carnivores: there’s a zoo in North Carolina, for instance, that gets the trimmings from a local steakhouse. Whole animals for carcass feedings with carnivores generally come from partnerships with local farmers or 4-H groups, and I know of at least one zoo that allows community members to donate deceased livestock (through a partnership with a veterinarian who knows how to euthanize animals in ways that make them safe for consumption).
(A lion at the Oregon Zoo pulls at a calf during a carcass feed).
Community relationships are also a great source of seasonal produce, like giant pumpkins for fall festivals or Christmas trees (which are not for eating) in winter.
One of my favorite stories that I’ve heard is about sloths: because they love flowers and they’re actually approved as part of their diet by vet staff, keepers would bring blooms in from their gardens for them. Flowers are expensive to buy and take effort to grow, so they’re not always commonly available – but they’re free if they grow in a keeper’s garden.
We all love disaster movies! The cool special effects, the underdog stories, the underlying themes of hope. As cool as they are, they do tend to use misconceptions about natural disasters. This normally wouldn’t be an issue since Hollywood will always embellish but it’s important to know the true science behind these phenomena should you ever encounter them.
1) Pyroclastic flows will kill you almost instantly, you cannot survive a direct hit
Movies guilty of this: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Dante’s Peak
Pyroclastic flows exceed 100km/h and reach temperatures over 1,000°C. You definitely cannot outrun it in either car or on foot. The boiling hot toxic gas, ash, and lava in the flow will kill you instantly and pummel your smoking corpse into oblivion. Sorry, Chris Pratt.
2) Tsunamis do not crest, they are more like a sudden flood than a wave
Movies guilty of this: Literally any movie with a tsunami ever
Tsunamis are massive and sudden floods caused by the displacement of ocean water due to earthquakes or massive landslides. They’re not tidal waves and thus do not crest. It’s poetic, but inaccurate.
3) Hail is always spherical and doesn’t fall in big cinder blocks of ice
Movies guilty of this:The Day After Tomorrow
Hail can get quite large and can definitely be fatal, but they are exclusively spherical. Hail is formed by water droplets cycling through the updrafts of a thunderstorm and the rotational movements make the resulting hail a ball.
Looks more like a stage hand is throwing the remains of an ice swan than a hail storm
4) You cannot freeze instantaneously. Not even in space.
Movies guilty of this: The Day After Tomorrow, Geostorm, The Cloverfield Paradox, Sunshine
Space, and certain places on Earth, can get exceedingly cold. The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was −89.2 °C. That’s damn cold. But you still wouldn’t flash freeze into a peoplesicle within mere seconds. Intense cold can kill you quickly if you’re completely exposed but it would still take time before your body would be a thoroughly frozen chunk of meat. As for space, it can get quite cold, but it’s also an empty vacuum. There’s nothing around you but empty void, which means there’s also nothing to transfer your body heat away from you. Without convection, your body heat would be lost via radiation and that can take a long time.
5) Earthquakes over 10 on the Richter scale are physically impossible on Earth.
Movies guilty of this: 10.5
You would need a massive fault line to carry that sort of energy. Something on the scale of going through the earth’s core. Which does not exist . Even then, if such an earthquake would occur, the planet would literally explode.A 15 magnitude earthquake would release energy on the magnitude of 1×10^32 joules. That, coincidentally, is the same amount of energy contained in the gravitational binding of the Earth. Simply put, anything greater than 9.9 on the Richter scale is impossible and would cause the Earth to explode.
6) California will and can not sink into the Pacific like a big slab, and it can’t break away from the rest of the US.
Movies guilty of this: 2012, 10.5
Most movies cite the San Andreas fault as the reason for the cleavage, but even this isn’t enough. The San Andreas fault is a transform fault, meaning the North American plate and the Pacific Plate are slowly horizontally grinding past each other, not pushing away. As California is a part of the greater Pacific plate, it literally could not snap free from it to “sink into the sea”. Because if the entire tectonic plate underneath California where to flip over and sink then the entire ocean would drain away into the mantle.
7) You can’t sink in lava. You also can’t stand near it without being burned.
Movies guilty of this: Volcano, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Lava is molten rock, and is incredibly dense. In fact, it’s three times as dense as humans, who are mostly water. If you were to cannonball into a lava pit, you would dip in a bit before bouncing to the top and floating. You would also burn up and die super quickly. Because fresh lava can exceed 1,200°C! Even standing a couple feet away from a lava flow, you would feel the intense heat radiation. You would lose your eyebrows and probably the top layer of your skin if you stood too close. There’s a reason why volcanologists wear protective suits. Sam and Frodo would have been roasted.
Can we make one of this but with Anatomy, biology and microbiology facts against Horror and Slasher movies?? Some mistakes are funny to watch but they’re so common that they became annoying.
I’m here for this 👆I want the anatomy physiology and microbiology vs dumb movie stuff edition pls 😀
fuck if it’s this easy why do they close the goddamn road for like five months shit
all outta soub 😦
I work for the road crew in the summer. Crack sealing (the process you see above) is fairly quick and simple. (Though holding a hose that pumps literal tons of 350F tar into the road in the middle of the summer is NOT easy)
I think what a lot of people underestimate is just how much road there is in your city. And just how many directions the crew gets pulled.
For our city of around 50k people there are 8 of us.
Also, crack sealing is a wholly temporary measure, meant to slow the break-up of the roads, it’s not a permanent fix.
Roads tend to get closed for months on end because we have to tear the whole thing up, then, depending on the class of road, we either have to hammer-drill into concrete to lay rebar and the pour concrete, or we can get straight to paving. If it’s a road requiring concrete we’re required to wait at least 24 hours for it to set.
So after 2 days we’re finally able to pave. But the city allocates one (two if we’re lucky) 5 ton truck to transport material.
A relatively short paving job requires at a minimum of 60 tons. So that’s 12 trips to the asphalt factory and back. Each ton is around $80.
TL;DR
There’s a lot of road, not many of us, and soup is expensive.
ifesbob 