Sulawesi shrimp & Co.

Counting day at Schönbrunn Zoo

Animal keeper Niklas Hörper counts the ring-tailed lemurs and red varis(Bild: DANIEL ZUPANC)

Almost 7000 animals live in the zoo - now the annual inventory has taken place

Stand still, now it's time to count! Whether lively ring-tailed lemurs or majestic Siberian tigers - every year an inventory of all animal inhabitants is carried out at Schönbrunn Zoo. Counting with a clipboard is purely symbolic, as detailed lists of the animal population are kept in the individual enclosures throughout the year.

In any case, the large annual inventory has revealed that Hietzing Zoo is home to 6860 animals from 615 different species and domestic animal breeds. These include various new additions, such as Mexican four-eyed octopuses, Sulawesi cardinal shrimps and Namibian noisy geckos. The latter came to the zoo as part of a confiscation at Vienna-Schwechat Airport.

The Siberian tiger was also counted.(Bild: Krone KREATIV, Daniel Zupanc)

Exotics are in the majority
There were also plenty of offspring last year, for example among the northern rockhopper penguins, the Kalong flying foxes and the maned seals. Schönbrunn Zoo was the first zoo in the world to succeed in breeding crocodile-tailed tejus - a sensation. In order to maintain healthy reserve populations, animals are also transferred to other zoological institutions.

The zoo cannot say which animals make up the largest population. Some animals are almost impossible to count, such as small fish that live in large shoals. Here, a certain value is estimated for the respective groups. But why all the counting? "So that we can keep track of our animals and set long-term goals, such as for their care and conservation," says the oldest zoo in the world.