Zookeeper For A Day Singapore

[Hasan Fogg]

Eachmorning, Indah Aliyah starts her day cleaning up as many as six 25kg bins of poop from the white rhinoceros she cares for. Next, she prepares about 50kg to 60kg of breakfast for the herd of 10. She does the same for the zebras and giraffes, and then spends her afternoons training these large animals.

Indah had originally pursued a very different career path. While studying Screen Media at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), she did freelance event videography, and also part-timed as a scriptwriter and filmmaking trainer for secondary school students with special needs and from troubled families.

The truth is, Indah knew she wanted to be a zookeeper from the time she was in kindergarten. My dad and I are big animal lovers. The two of us share the same birthday, and when I was a child, we had a tradition of going to the zoo on our birthdays.

My favourite part of the zoo was the polar bear exhibit. They are really majestic animals. Their fur is not really white but translucent, and their skin is black. Their whiteness comes from the reflection of the snow from the sun. They are really cool.

Each day, she does basic target training with these magnificent beasts, encouraging them to touch a ball at the end of a stick with their nose, and rewarding them with a click or whistle, and treats such as fruits and vegetables.

These training sessions usually take place in the afternoon and involve two keepers, one focusing on target training, and the other on blood draw or hoof training. It takes a lot of patience and communication. Sometimes, because of miscommunication, the training may go sideways.

Another enjoyable part of her job are the token feeding sessions that take place at specific times of the day. Guests pay a token sum to hand-feed the giraffes and rhinoceros their favourite treats, such as slices of honeydew. This is one of the times Indah gets to interact with guests.

The highlight of my day is seeing them do weird things. Izara, one of our young zebras, has a new habit of standing on top of the food trough while eating, even though the rest of the herd is also eating from the same trough.

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In Singapore, 10 captive lions tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 by real-time PCR. Genomic analyses of nanopore sequencing confirmed human-to-animal transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant. Viral genomes from the lions and zookeeper shared a unique spike protein substitution, S:A1016V. Widespread SARS-CoV-2 transmission among humans can increase the likelihood of anthroponosis.

We investigated natural SARS-CoV-2 infection in captive African (Panthera leo) and Asiatic (Panthera leo persica) lions at a zoo in Singapore during increased Delta variant community infections. Understanding virus dynamics in different hosts is crucial for preventing interspecies transmission and protecting endangered species (1,2).

To minimize stress on the animals, only 2 lions that had more severe signs, AS-M1 and AS-F1, were anesthetized for nasal and oropharyngeal sample collection on November 8. On November 9, we confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in the lions by real-time reverse transcription PCR (rRT-PCR); cycle quantitation (Cq) values were

Within 5 days of the index case, 10 lions (all 9 Asiatic and 1 African) were infected. Most (8/10) clinically recovered from respiratory signs within 2 weeks; 2 lions took longer to recover, but all animals had recovered by December 3, 2021. Full recovery in the lions was determined by low viral RNA loads (Cq >40), absence of clinical signs, and resumption of normal behavior.

Figure. Maximum-likelihood phylogenomic tree from a case of anthropogenic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from humans to lions, Singapore, 2021. Tree reconstructed from sequences of 2 lions and 1 zookeeper (red bold text),...

The implications of SARS-CoV-2 infection in captive lions extend beyond animal health and welfare and can have consequences for the conservation of protected species. Insights from studies on minks and hamsters shed light on the potential for animal-to-human transmission (6,8). However, mass culling, as noted in those studies of small mammals, is an impractical approach for large or endangered animal species.

Lions already face numerous threats, including habitat loss, poaching, and disease; introduction of a novel virus like SARS-CoV-2 could have devastating consequences for their populations (7). Therefore, strengthening biosecurity measures in wildlife conservation centers and promoting vaccination of susceptible animal species whenever feasible and safe are crucial for mitigating viral transmission and protecting vulnerable wildlife populations (1,9).

Dr. Ip is a scientific research officer at the Centre for Animal and Veterinary Sciences within the National Parks Board, Singapore. His research interests center around genomic and environmental DNA tools for molecular epidemiology, animal community assessments, rapid detection of pathogens, tracking animal diseases, and studying the dynamics of virus evolution and transmission.

We thank former and current colleagues of the National Parks Board, Mandai Wildlife Group, for their invaluable assistance and contributions, and the Singapore Immunology Network for supporting the investigation of this incident.

All data are available in the main text or the Appendix materials and can be found on the Zenodo repository at Raw sequence reads generated in this study have been uploaded to the National Center for Biotechnology Information Sequence Read Archive under BioProject no. PRJNA1021696.

The Altmetric Attention Score for a research output provides an indicator of the amount of attention that it has received. The score is derived from an automated algorithm, and represents a weighted count of the amount of attention Altmetric picked up for a research output.

When Ms Delvinder Kaur first joined the Singapore Zoo after her A Levels, she thought she was only taking on a fun holiday job. Developing a passion for invertebrates was the last thing the English Language and Communications major expected. (Photo: Marcus Ramos)

SINGAPORE: When Ms Delvinder Kaur signed up for a stint as a show presenter at the Singapore Zoo in 2013, she expected nothing more than a fun holiday job of playing with animals and speaking to visitors before moving on to do her university degree.

Show presenting gave her the opportunity to work with a variety of animals, such as sea lions and elephants, and develop her understanding of them. And it was this understanding that allowed her to appreciate the animals a lot more.

All the guidance and hard work paid off when she managed to move from her part-time position to a full-time junior zookeeper position in 2016. At the same time, she started her English Language and Communications degree with the Singapore University of Social Sciences, which she is due to complete in a year.

Zookeeping encompasses more than just caring for the animals. Other than zoology, there are departments such as conservation, nutrition, veterinary - which work closely to ensure the zoo functions smoothly.

She added that conservation begins with the smallest projects. Even actions like understanding the role of bees in the ecosystem and leaving a beehive alone to perform its natural functions would help wildlife thrive.

She pointed to the zoo's Swallowtail Day held this year, where members of the public were invited to join them to look for the butterflies. Not only did the activity teach participants about Swallowtail butterflies, the event closed with a sharing sessions with specialists, who taught participants about the things they could do to help the conservation of the species, she said.

She is currently working on the Pollinator Project which focuses on improving the population of butterflies and stingless bees through surveys of these species across all of Wildlife Reserves Singapore's parks, studying different potential habitats, and enhancing existing ones.

With some of them nearly half a palm in size, these black-headed, brown-bodied, segmented creatures can scurry through the tanks at a dizzying pace. Each tank can hold up to a few hundred cockroaches - although Delvinder remembered her first tank being four times the size.

It took her about a week to get over her fear, but having the opportunity to learn about these cockroaches, to understand them, and to hold her first cockroach, was crucial in getting over her fear, she said.

In fact, invertebrates play a larger role than most people might expect: comprising 97 per cent of the animal kingdom, they are important for the continued survival of all animal species on Earth, she said.

The male lead, Chandler Young, is an enthusiastic zookeeper in the Wildlife Zoo. He is worried about fund insufficiency as a result of depletion of visitors to the zoo. The female lead, Natalia Johnson is the president of the Animal Liberation Organisation. Her aim is to release all the animals in captivity into the wild. One day, she posed as a zookeeper to work in the Wildlife Zoo and tried to set the animals free. A fire broke out in the zoo unexpectedly!

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