How do giraffes feed their babies

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Mammal zoo: how, who and what feeds the cubs

This year, the Kaliningrad Zoo for the first time took part in…. WHO World Breastfeeding Support Week, which took place from 1 to 7 August. It would seem, what does the zoo have to do with breastfeeding? Yes, the most immediate! After all, babies of various types and calibers are regularly born here, and they all need one thing - proper nutrition. And more correctly than mother's milk, as you know, nothing has been invented yet. Of course, like people, animals also have all sorts of overlays, and then babies have to be fed artificially. About what newborn monkeys are fed, how they managed to teach a female giraffe to breastfeed and whose milk is equally suitable for both elephants and bison, the zoo staff told on a special excursion organized jointly with the clothing project for nursing mothers "UMKA wear" and the regional branch of the All-Russian Association Natural Feeding Consultants.

WHERE DOES THE PROBLEM OR REJECT KIDS COME FROM?

The life of animals in the zoo is very different from life in the wild, where refuseniks are rare. In captivity, especially if the zoo does not pay due attention to the conditions of keeping animals (allows closely related relationships, keeps animals in small enclosures, does not enrich the environment), their behavior may change. For example, they may intentionally kill their offspring (as a result of severe stress or inappropriate conditions of detention). Or, as an option, they do not show any interest in the offspring, do not express a desire to feed. In this case, if the baby is healthy, a decision can be made to artificially feed him.

HOW IS THE PROBLEM SOLVED?

Over the years of the zoo’s existence, everyone has been fed in it: from hares and squirrels, which were brought in large quantities by visitors, to mountain goats, cubs and monkeys.

Since artificial feeding cannot 100% replace mother's milk (with it, the cub receives vital enzymes - specific proteins that are present in all living cells and play the role of biological catalysts. Through them, genetic information is realized and all metabolic and energy processes in living organisms), ideally, it is desirable to give refuseniks to a foster mother, it can even be of a different kind. To do this, some zoos keep dogs - they feed wolf cubs (in 2012, in the Vladivostok zoo, a nulliparous dog fed a wolf cub (http://poisk-druga.ru/news/1612-sobaka-vykormila-volchonka.html)), tiger cubs ( in the zoo of the Chinese city of Changchut, a dog nursed two cubs (https://www.kp.ru/online/news/29701)), panthers (at the Belgrade Zoo a dog nursed a baby panther (https://www.kp.ru/online/news/29701)) and others. lynxes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32wrkHKN1ak)), raccoons (in April 2018, a cat started feeding newborn raccoons at the Vladivostok Zoo (http://vestiprim.ru/news/ptrnews/62547-v -zooparke-vladivostoka-koshka-vykormila-detenyshey-enota.htm...) and other animals.

If there is no foster mother, the “breadwinners” for the refuseniks are people – zoo employees.

In each case, feeding is preceded by a study of the quality of animal milk (composition, fat content, frequency, duration of feeding, etc.). This is necessary because these parameters vary greatly among mammals. A female bison, for example, feeds a cub every 1.5 hours; bunny hare - once every 3 days; the elephant feeds the cub with milk up to 2 years, the female orangutan - up to 4).

In the first 2-3 days, when the cub should receive colostrum from the mother, goat colostrum is used whenever possible. Colostrum contains proteins, vitamins, microelements and amino acids that "start" the gastrointestinal tract, help to get rid of the original feces and form the child's immunity. If it is not possible to obtain colostrum, the risk of infection of young animals with infectious diseases increases. That's why veterinarians and livestock specialists are especially looking forward to the baby's first ... feces.

After the first few days, refuse-bearing animals, especially the offspring of ungulates, can be fed with goat's milk - it is the most suitable for them. The milk of cows and horses is considered more "heavy".

For feeding other animals, dry cat and dog milk can be used, which contains the necessary vitamins and microelements. (A kangaroo cub, who miraculously survived after the death of his mother as a result of an attack by stray dogs, was fed with dry cat's milk in the Kaliningrad Zoo; raccoons were fed with dry milk of a dog.)

WHAT IS THE SITUATION IN THE ZOO NOW?

Employees of the zootechnical departments periodically feed the cubs, for some reason left without parental care, including those removed from the wild (for example, seal pups, which are found every spring in an emaciated state on the Baltic beaches).

However, artificial feeding creates a number of problems.

Among them - the formation of unnatural behavioral reactions due to communication with a person; defects in physical development, difficulty, and often the impossibility of introducing an artificial into the family / flock. The latter problem, of course, is not typical for solitary animals, for example, orangutan, anteater, pygmy hippopotamus, tiger.

However, these difficulties can be overcome; an artificial child has every chance to grow up healthy and join the team, provided that the process of artificial feeding was carried out correctly, and the physical development of the baby (physical development in animals is much more important than in humans!) was done as carefully and thoroughly as the organization of his nutrition.

KANGAROO

The Kaliningrad Zoo has been attacked by stray dogs twice in recent years. In 2014, as a result of such an attack, 5 animals died, including two pregnant females. One of the cubs fell, the second was saved. Veterinarians and livestock specialists came up with the idea to try to feed the baby artificially.

The difficulty of feeding a kangaroo lies in the peculiarities of the development of the fetus: it is born tiny, underdeveloped; moving to his mother in a bag on his stomach, he sticks to the nipple and lives for some time, continuing to represent one whole with his mother. The mother injects milk into the baby's mouth.

Kangaroo cubs do not have their own intestinal microflora; the kangaroo receives it only with mother's milk. Therefore, during feeding, in addition to milk, specialists had to give the cub probiotics and salt formulations to maintain the water-salt balance in the body.

SEALS

Pinnipeds do not have enzymes that break down carbohydrates, so there are no carbohydrates (lactose) in their milk. Accordingly, their cubs CANNOT be fed with the milk of other mammals because it contains lactose.

Therefore, seal pups are fed first with just a liquid (saline, saline), then a homogeneous mixture made from several varieties of fish, raw eggs, B vitamins mixed with water. The mixture is fed directly into the baby's stomach through a tube. The next step is to force-feed the seals with small pieces of fish in order to develop the swallowing reflex. The last step is feeding the whole fish.

LION RICHARD

Born in May 2016 to a pair of lions, Tisza and Boniface. Some time later, the veterinarians diagnosed the baby with beriberi, and the parents, due to their rather advanced age, behaved rather coolly with the cub. Richard was moved to a separate enclosure and given a 10-day course of vitamin B1 injections and calcium supplements. Up to 2 months, he was fed with milk, at the same time introducing complementary foods.

At the age of three months, the baby was sent to the zoo in Perm, where he was accompanied by a young lion from St. Petersburg. Now artificially fed Richard willingly contacts people and gets along well with a neighbor.

THE BEARS

Brown bear cubs in the zoo were often artificially fed. The nursing bear was briefly hidden from visitors. However, they were soon returned to the exposition, and the babies were transferred to artificial complementary foods.

Polar bears fed their offspring themselves. For this, special conditions had to be created - an analogue of a cave, where absolute silence and peace reign.

pygmy hippos

In the 70s. The Kaliningrad Zoo was the first to obtain offspring of this species. The cubs had to be fed artificially, because the mother did not want to feed them.

GIRAFFE SAFARI

Born November 14, 2017 to a female Willow. None of Willow's previous four cubs could be saved: they were either born dead or died quickly, because Willow did not want to feed them.

Medical training helped to solve this problem in behavior: long before giving birth, Iva, who did not allow her to touch her stomach, was gently taught to touch: she was gently stroked with a ball on a long stick.

Another problem - the lack of a sucking reflex in a newborn giraffe - was solved thanks to the experience of the zoos in Krasnoyarsk and London: colleagues advised putting a hand on the baby's forehead before feeding.

ELEPHANT MARCH

She was born in March 1996 to the elephant Pregolya. Previous baby elephants born by Pregol did not survive. The same fate awaited Marta, if livestock specialists, literally risking their lives, immediately after the birth, did not distract the mother and take the baby away.

Such incorrect behavioral responses were due to the peculiarities of the social organization of elephants: they live in families consisting of several females of different ages. Younger females learn motherhood from older females caring for newborns. There was no one to learn motherhood from before: she was the only mother of Shandra.

Martha was fed formula milk. Since there was not enough fat content, they were supplemented with 40% cream (4 liters per day). Then they boiled milk porridges with ground oatmeal on cream, adding mashed bananas and apples.

Natalya Durov, the famous trainer of the Durov dynasty, who came to watch Martha in order to later take her to the circus, was fine with the fact that she never knew her mother and was fed by people - such animals in the circus are tamed and trained faster.

MONKEY

A large number of monkeys were kept in the Kaliningrad Zoo before the Tropical House was put into operation. The collection included all kinds of anthropoids, including gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees. Specialists had to artificially feed the cubs of chimpanzees and orangutans.

The female chimpanzee was born prematurely. Mother fell on the second day after birth. They reared the cub in the incubator. They were fed formula milk. In the children's dairy kitchen, the baby was specially prepared kefir, acidolact and cottage cheese.

Orangi Sipora and Badut entered the Kaliningrad Zoo at the age of 4 and 3 years. The zoo staff fed the cubs a lot, which as a result became completely tame, while losing their natural skills. The behavior of the animals was deformed, so when Sipora had a cub, she took it as a toy, causing injury to the newborn. The baby had to be separated from her parents and fed with mixtures.

BISON BOGDAN

A male bison was born on August 4, 2008 from an old female who died a day after giving birth. Since the calf was expected to become a sire when it grew older, the decision was made to try to save it by artificially feeding it. The livestock specialist of the Hoofed Animals Department Ekaterina Demidyuk was promised: if the calf survives, we will fulfill any wish. Catherine dreamed ... about porcupines. So porcupines and a bison-producer appeared in the Kaliningrad Zoo.

The female bison feeds the cub every 1.5 hours. Accordingly, the day of Ekaterina Demidyuk began at 4 in the morning (that's what she had to get up to prepare mixtures and be in time for the zoo for the first feeding of the baby) and ended at 11 pm.

In the first 2-3 days, the buffalo, who was named Bogdan, was given a mixture of goat's milk with egg yolk. Until 1.5 months in his diet was only goat's milk. From 4 months - cereals cooked in cow's milk, from pre-ground oatmeal. By the age of 10 months, he was eating 15 liters of such porridge a day! Branches and boiled acorns were used as additives. For the fastest increase in body weight, instead of water, Bogdan was given a decoction of acorns, herbal tea and compotes.

In addition to feeding, Ekaterina Demidyuk was also engaged in the physical development of the buffalo: she walked and ran around the enclosure with him, played, or rather, “collected” bruises and bumps, since the maturing Bogdan actively butted heads and kicked “mother” from time to time.

The author of the article is S. Korolevskaya.

The size and shape of the spots on giraffes determined their chances of survival

The shape and size of the spots on the skin of baby giraffes were associated with their chances of surviving at a young age, although scientists cannot say for sure how this can be explained. At the same time, cubs inherit some characteristics of spots on the skin from their mothers. A study about this is published in the journal PeerJ .

Giraffe spotting, like the coloration of many other striped and spotted animals, is as individual as human fingerprints, but scientists do not yet know exactly how it is formed and whether it has inherited traits. “The patterns of spots on the skin of giraffes are complex and can be very vary from individual to individual, but we don't really know what they're for. Complex spots can help animals avoid predators, regulate body temperature or to recognize relatives and specific individuals, and all this can influence their the ability to survive and reproduce,” said co-author Derek Lee (Derek Lee) from the University of Pennsylvania, quoted by the press service organizations.

To understand how spotting patterns might be related to animal heredity and survival, Li's team compared field observations of female Masai giraffes ( Giraffa camelopardalis tippelskirchii ) and their calves in Tanzania and photographs of their skins from shoulder to hind leg. . The shape, size and color of the spots can be very different, but do not change during the life of the animal - thus, an individual can be identified from birth by the pattern of spots. The animals were tracked by marking and recapturing over an area of 1.7 thousand square kilometers for four years. The scientists used the ImageJ program to analyze the shape of the spots, in which they described all the spots in 11 parameters, from the number and area of spots to color and contour.

The authors of the article found that two of the 11 characteristics of the spot are proximity its shape to a perfect circle and the smoothness of the edges are statistically significantly (p=0.0037 and p=0.0041, respectively) similar in females and their cubs. To do this, they examined 31 pairs of animals: female giraffes feed only their own cubs, but it is impossible to establish their fathers without interfering in the life of animals.

According to the authors of the study, this means that these traits are inherited from females. "Ann Innis Dagg, author of the first field studies of giraffes in Africa, at 1968 provided evidence that the shape, number, area and color of spots on the skin giraffes may be inherited, but she made her assumptions on a small scale. group of animals in the zoo. We used modern methods of observation and analysis on wild giraffes to confirm her findings,” said co-author the work of Monica Bond (Monica Bond).

In addition, following the fate of 258 giraffes from birth, the authors of the study showed that cubs with larger irregularly shaped spots had more high chances of survival in the first three to four months of life. Scientists are not sure what this may be connected with - perhaps such spots perform some kind of of their supposed functions, such as camouflage from predators.

The authors note that their proposed system of characteristics of spots can be used in field studies of giraffes and other animals with complex skin patterns. They also write that it is possible that the shape and parameters of the spots correlate with survival and reproductive success in older animals as well - more research will be required to find out.