Digging in and Unearthing Fascinating Meerkat Facts

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Speaker 1: Ruby.

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Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Rick Schwartz.

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Speaker 1: What is the s World?

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Speaker 2: I'm Marco Went and this this is Amazing Wildlife, a podcast where we explore unique stories of wildlife from around the world and uncovered fascinating animal facts. Now. This podcast is in production with iHeartRadio's Ruby Studio and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, the international nonprofit conservation organization which oversees the San Diego Zoo where we are right now and the Safari Park.

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Speaker 1: Rick, I am super pumped. It's season four, right.

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Speaker 3: We're also adding a little bit of a different flavor for our listeners.

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Speaker 1: If you're not aware.

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Speaker 3: Yet, we are adding a visual component. So we have our amazing our stupendency piece. There, resist stunts, Amanda, our videographer going to be listen Amanda. So this is going to be super exciting for us, right, So a new new kind of aspect for our guest experience Amazing Wildlife.

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Speaker 2: That's true, and so it does change the format a little bit. So for our listeners that have been with us over the years, it's still all the cool stuff, but the format change is little and if you want now, the videos are going to drop a little bit later than the audio. So if you are watching this now, thanks for joining us already. If you'd like to watch it though, and you're just listening, well YouTube, probably maybe somewhere else, right.

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Speaker 1: Right, we're gonna tease it a little bit, right, But what do you suggest for us?

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Speaker 2: I think maybe they should follow you on Instagram as zoology Marco, right, because is that way we can let people know.

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Speaker 3: On Instagram and TikTok by the way, let TikTok talk, but please follow zoology rick here ig.

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Speaker 2: Pretty much IG is my home. Yeah, yeah, that is the best way to do it, and that way we can let people know when the videos drop as well. So but yeah, and if audio only is your thing, well then stick with us because this is gonna be an amazing season.

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Speaker 3: But you know, hey, while we're talking that, I kind of noticed, did you bring a show and Tell items?

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Speaker 2: I did bring some show and tell?

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Speaker 1: Okay, what is?

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Speaker 2: This is our latest version of the San Diegos Wildlife Alliance Journal. So we've got meerkats and the article is so cool. A lot of times people think your catch is cute, cuddly, fun and are cute. Yeah there cuddly if you're also a merk cat. I suppose that's in the family totally. But the article is fascinating. Wouldn't it be great to talk to the person who wrote it, and she happens to be a wildlifecare specialist here at the San Diego Zoo. I love it that takes care of meerkats. Lacey, thank you so much for joining us today.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you Rick and Marco for having me.

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Speaker 1: Thanks so excited. Good morning, good morning.

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Speaker 2: There is so much in this article that's absolutely fascinating that the way you wrote it in kind of layers to bring the person reading it through. I want you to do the most exact same thing here in the sense of the very first thing you talk about is a word Marco has been obsessed with.

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Speaker 1: Yes, you stress, right, Yes.

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Speaker 2: But it's stressed you st okay, so U s t.

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Speaker 4: R e s s U stress.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's a very fancy way of saying a light stressor something that builds confidence or resiliency.

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Speaker 2: Okay.

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Speaker 3: I mean that was fascinating for me, especially for social animals, social dynamics, even birds and flocks. But I never really thought of these specs in meerkats, you know. But before we like deep dive into that.

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Speaker 1: Burrow so to speak.

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Speaker 3: Like that, you like that, Amanda? It was not good, Yeah, thank you. You know, I was actually kind.

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Speaker 1: Of curious assuming our listeners.

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Speaker 3: Don't know what a meer cat is. Man, you can't describe it for us a little bit right because I'm kind of wondering.

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Speaker 4: It's a small mammal.

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Speaker 5: It's a type of mongoose, and it's light tan with some striping on the back, so horizontal stripes along its body, and then a little bit black on the tail, with some black around the eyes.

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Speaker 4: Really small ears and a long pointy noise.

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Speaker 2: Made famous a little bit by Timoon from.

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Speaker 4: The line, oh yes, of course.

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Speaker 2: A couple of decades ago, there was a TV show on one of the animal programs that it was like a series following a family, which might have been a little dramatized for television. But we want to talk about the facts. We want to talk about the facts. You stress. You'd mentioned as a stressor that's a light stressor that can then help the individual grow from that. What came to mind is a parent right away. What came to mind was teaching my daughter to ride a bike. There's very stress full, white knuckling, you know, the thing she did. Fine, I was hit, but in the sense that initial stress of learning something new, but once you make it through that, it actually you grow from it. So how does that apply to meer cat life? Because they don't ride bikes.

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Speaker 5: No, they don't ride bikes well yet, so much of what meer cats do is learned behavior. So they do have some natural tendencies. When they're first born, they do move their little paws around almost like they're digging, but they're looking around as though they have no clue what this behavior.

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Speaker 4: Is or what the purpose is.

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Speaker 5: So a lot of what they do in life is a learned behavior that they learn from watching their mob mates and then mimicking. And so when they mimic those behaviors, they learn that, oh, when I do this, I can uncover meal worms and I eat them because everyone else is eating them and they taste good or they're fulfilling or whatever it is that they're being reinforced by. So they start with u stress on their own right away. When they start learning to walk, they're falling down all the time, just like you're saying with your kiddos, you know your kindo learns to walk.

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Speaker 4: It's so important to let them fall. It's hard. It's really hard to watch them fall.

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Speaker 5: But the more they fall, the better they get it balanced and they learn resiliency and they learn to trust themselves to start walking.

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Speaker 4: Enough that they can run.

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Speaker 5: So it's all the behaviors they do that meer cats do and that humans do help to build our resiliency for new activities. And then the meerkat world, you stress, is even more important later to learn to cope with the environment as a whole, and not just the immediate things that we think about like eating and sunbathing and sleeping.

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Speaker 3: I mean, there's a lot of dynamics too, right, And well, yeah, within the mob, you know, the relationships between the individuals.

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Speaker 1: I mean we're talking Africa and the desert. Yeah, the different predators, serviles and birds of prey.

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Speaker 3: Are coming over, so a lot of things that these animals have to kind of negotiate on a day to day right.

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Speaker 2: Right, And I got to jump in real quick. We have used this word a couple of times. Just to clarify. You said mob mates, you said in the mob. So just to let everybody know, I'm a meerkat. Collective group is called a mob, and I think it's appropriate. We've worked with meerkats plenty. Where do you think the name mob of meerkats comes from?

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Speaker 5: I think it comes from their big attitudes. They're really really confident in themselves, and oftentimes that leads to a dispute amongst mob mates.

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Speaker 4: If you will, we see.

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Speaker 5: Them, if they feel intimidated by anything, they will either run away from it or they mob. They all kind of run at the item at once to scare it away, and that's I think where the term probably originated.

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Speaker 2: It makes sense.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, it definitely makes sense that they're big attitudes. For sure, they're very confident.

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Speaker 3: Oh that's great, And honestly, in the article, I loved that what you were referring to you and you were talking about the mob here at the San Diego Zoo, write certain dynamics that happened. Could you, for our listeners kind of describe briefly what happened here in this wonderful story.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, of course, just to give a little bit of background, we did have a meerkat matriarch, so meerkats live in a matriarchal society, and our dominant female at the time had passed on. She was very bold and her daughters had to decide who was the to be the next matriarch, and so that always brings a lot of tension into the mob.

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Speaker 2: Those decide it.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, it's not, it's more of a situation.

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Speaker 4: It is. Yeah, it's it's definitely not an election. It's not. It's not very kind.

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Speaker 5: Everyone kind of throws their hat in the rings, so to speak, but they do so by hip checking each other, so throwing hips and then biting at each other and vocalizing at each other in a it's not such a nice sound. Could be a dominant, very very big display of dominance, and when five or more meerkats are showing that dominance, it can become bloody. So it's pretty violent looking. But it's very important for them to be able to identify who the next matriarch is because they're all going to help raise those pups, and even if that's just so that next time they can be matriarch, they are going to assist in raising those pups so that in the future they can maybe get their genetics spread. But either way, they live in family groups, so by helping you raise those pups, they're helping to raise their distant siblings. So they are helping to further their own genetics. So we think that's probably what draws that behavior a little more.

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Speaker 3: There's so much there, right, that's so many.

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Speaker 2: I digress, but real quick for you go further into the family that we have here. Yeah, you mentioned in the article too, that sort of what you just talked about. It sort of seems when you look at it from the outside, Oh, they're collectively working together to raise the young. But I love the way you put us like, but that's not exactly. It's like, it's more of us. They're not. It's not altruistic. They're not looking at the family as like over supporting each other. It really is so I can get in there, hopefully next in line to be in charge should the matriarch pass away or something happen to her.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, there's definitely some underlying quid pro quo there building.

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Speaker 2: Track the family here.

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Speaker 4: So we at a certain.

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Speaker 5: Point we only had females and they were all fighting for it's matriarchy, but there wasn't a male and so it made it a little bit confusing for them.

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Speaker 4: And we were seeing a lot of violence.

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Speaker 5: And in the past, if the violence gets to a certain point, they don't have the to leave their habitat. Like in the wild, they would just move on to another space, which oftentimes could lead to death because they're alone until they find another mob willing to take them in. So we're not okay with death as an option, so we move them to their own separate habitat and we give them their own separate mob. So the individuals that they do have a bond with still that they are getting along with, we would separate them. So at a certain point we had two separate groups with two females in each group. Then we started witnessing that when there's only two meerkats in a mob, that means one has to be on sentry duty. Dy sentry duty is, thank you MARKA sentry duty is when you're watching for predators or any kind of danger that's on the horizon. So they're watching out for hawks, snakes. We have an open habitat here, open air habitat, so we do have hawks in the area who come by, and we have airplanes that are very feisty. So our meerkats are on sentry duty half the day. But when they're on sentry duty, they can't be eating to be sunning, and they can't be digging, and so we started to notice that their nails were getting a little bit longer from having less time to self maintained.

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Speaker 1: Oh wow, not having enough meerkats.

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Speaker 5: There's not enough meer cats to help share that responsibility, right, And so we thought, okay, it would be great if we could put them together. But they don't like being together. They're having this really big dispute. What are we going to do? And we thought, well, we recognize that here in managed care, we have this situation where we're taking away so much of the stress that you find in wild animals, right, which we think of as ethically good.

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Speaker 4: Right, we make sure they don't enough food. We don't want people to be stressed. We don't want animals to be stressed. So we took away your predators. You're having to search for food in a very hot climate. San Diego is beautiful weather.

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Speaker 5: You have all the food you could ever want here, and most of the predators are gone because there's people here all the time. And so we recognize that maybe part of the reason that they are seemingly altruistic in nature is because they are bonded from having to work together against themselves against all of these outer stressors kind of makes you feel like my brothers, you know, like sometimes I kind of get a little upste with them from time to time.

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Speaker 1: But if someone comes to my brother, right.

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Speaker 4: Yes, yes, yeah, exactly, that's exactly it.

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Speaker 5: So you're more likely to if you and he both came together to make breakfast on a regular basis, right, you would be more likely to defend him if someone was going to come at absolutely. Yeah, no, I think that's a pro. Well, that's exactly what merkats do. They do not share food, like that is the one thing they do not share. We'll all sleep together in the same den, we'll all help dig around, and we'll all help do sentry duty. But I am not going to share, absolutely, which I totally get.

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Speaker 3: Wow, So you had the two moms, but they're too focused on other certain dynamics of having a smaller mob, like you mentioned the sentinel looking out and the other one can maybe express those other behaviors that you're looking for.

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Speaker 5: Right, So we tried to find a way of bringing in a light stress or a U stress to their use stresser cap existence. And we thought, we have so many other animals here that they've never encountered.

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Speaker 4: We have elephants. That's a very pungent feces from elephants.

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Speaker 5: And that's the great sense of smell is the size of a meerkat. If I were a merkat coming upon an elephant fecal pile for the first time, I would be really intimidated. That's a strange smell. It's a humongous animal that could definitely crush me. It's very intimidating. So we put that all over the habitat, hoping that maybe the sense of a new animal will help change the focus from aggression inward to protection from outward.

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Speaker 2: Wow.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, external factors, right, I mean no, no, it makes sense.

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Speaker 3: I mean exturing in Africa, you know, like I'm not with my buddies, my mom, We're chilling, we're having a great time, and the big herd elephants come by. So I'm gonna thumb the sentinel, get alert, let's get in those burroughs.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, And I was about to say, even if it's not something just like a big animal, that might be scary, but if it is an actual true predator that might be trying to hunt them, that sentinel puts out those alarm calls. The group collectively then responds and does their thing to go under or whatever they need to do. Mob together, if it's a snake, whatever it may be. So by adding these things in these youth stressors that clearly in the wild would make a mob act collectively to protect each other. What did we see here on this end of the zoo.

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Speaker 5: It seems to have worked as we had hypothesized, so we were very excited. It seemed like the meerkats responded as we had hoped. They all individually identified a concern. They all went down the same tunnel, which we identify as it's most likely their denning space.

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Speaker 4: It's where they come out first thing in the morning.

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Speaker 5: They all went down there separately, and then after a couple of hours down there together when they came back up, we offered food.

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Speaker 4: There were no discussions we.

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Speaker 5: Call them hip checking, aggressing toward each other, no vocalizations that were aggressive, and they seem to be a lot more cohesive. So this is something that we thought, well that it could be a one off, right, We don't know. Yeah, So we've tried a number of times since and we varied the opportunity for you stress that we offer. So we've put elephant feces. We've done other animals feces. We have a kite that we have flown in the air with the sound of a hawk. Yeah, that one was very effective and they actually monitored that area for a couple of weeks.

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Speaker 2: Wow.

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Speaker 5: They were very hyper vigilant about anything coming over and real.

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Speaker 2: Quick with all the trees. We have. Hats off to whoever flew that kite.

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Speaker 5: Thank you.

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Speaker 1: That's amazing totally.

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Speaker 3: It's all the different dynamics of what you were thinking about, you know, all this different kind of input that happens out in Africa that you're replicating here at.

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Speaker 1: The San Diego Zoo.

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Speaker 3: I mean, these animals evolved for certain reasons, any certain dynamics, So that's really great that it worked out that way for you.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, really fascinating too that throughout. I mean both Mark and I have thirty years yeah, in the businesses roughly close and in all the years we've been working with animals before coming to the podcast world, to look back at what it was like ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, the belief, like you had said, let's try and remove as much stress from these animals lives as possible. To then come full circle and realize well, actually, certain stress is a really good thing for them because if it helps them express other dynamics of their life, whatever may be, And so for meerkats in this case, that social bond becomes stronger. In the article, you mentioned then that these two groups were separate, like you had said here, Yes, but then doing these youth stressors, you were able to bring all four together. Is that correct?

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Speaker 5: Yeah, all four lived together, and a couple of them still live here, still live together. But yeah, all four lived together very well for the next I think we did that back in twenty twenty three. So for the next at least a year, the four females were living together in harmony and they did some hip checking, which is normal and natural. But we didn't see that overt aggression that would cause us to want to separate again from that point on, and we didn't have to reintroduce these u stress opportunities frequently. Once we started seeing an uptick in aggression, that could mean a very broad number of things. Either there's a change in the diet that needs to be addressed, or there's a health concern.

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Speaker 4: So, because there's so much going on.

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Speaker 5: In the society of meerkat world, we would kind of play with what we thought the purpose was, and if it seemed like it was aggression towards just trying to establish a matriarchy, then we could add in just a light YOUU stress. I think since fall of twenty twenty three, we've maybe offered four opportunities for U stress, for light use stress. So it's not been something we've had to use frequently, but every time that we've used it has actually changed the group dynamic in a positive way and made them work closer together.

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Speaker 2: Nice.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, nice.

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Speaker 2: At what point there was a male? Yeah, So I want to just say before explain all because it's freaking fascinating. When I was working with meerkats way back in the day, the idea of introducing a new one or even there was even issues with like if someone had to go up to the vet hospital and they come back, Yes, there was always just like the reintroduction process could be super stressful and they might not accept them and there's gonna be lots of teeth and claws and another vet visit possibly because of that. So reading this article, I was like, no, so please tell us how it happened.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, So we weren't nervous this is a whole new meerkat. This isn't a sibling that you've known in a past life and you thought you evicted them long ago and now they're back and it's like, oh, well, maybe they never left.

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Speaker 4: That's my bad.

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Speaker 1: And a male to boot right.

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Speaker 4: But it's a male.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, And typically introducing a male is a little less stressful for us, I will say, oh, yeah than introducing a female. A female is a potential matriarch, and there's a little bit more competition in the So that's that's more stressful for me.

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Speaker 4: But that's use capital.

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Speaker 2: Yes for sure.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, we introduced the male. We did a very similar setting. Everyone had access to every habitat separately, and then we brought in I think we had different sets that time from someone else, what have you, And everything happened almost exactly the same.

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Speaker 4: We had all of the females go to the male.

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Speaker 5: There was a lot of hip checking, there was a lot of vocalization, and then they all went down to their denning area where they had been familiar. And this male had not been very familiar with the dynamic of the group, which is fascinating because he'd had access to the habitat, but a meer cat. Having a habitat without another meer cat is very different than having another meer cat to show you where the bolt holes are, which are the holes they used to get away from predators, or where do we done at night? So he had seen everything, but it didn't have that meaning to it. And then you could see once he had been introduced to that group of females, he actually followed them down the den hole to the den and when they all came out, they were again just one family group that was cohesive and they ate food all in front of us.

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Speaker 4: And from that moment on he's been a part of it. And now he's a dad.

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Speaker 2: Say yeah, yeah, so when were the babies born?

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Speaker 4: So we had the pups born August twentieth. We had four pups born.

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Speaker 1: And they are the cutest.

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Speaker 3: I was seeing some of those pictures on the magazine. Yeah right, this is the photographers see man, the cutest little babies. But they got a lot to learn out there right with that mom there.

00:19:35
Speaker 1: That's exciting.

00:19:36
Speaker 3: Yeah wow, So I didn't realize there was so much involved with just the social dynamics of meerkats. Hopefully our listeners when they come to the san Diego Zoo and they see our meer cats, so maybe like stop for a second and just really look and observe the little subtle nuances.

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Speaker 4: It's going on, right, Yeah, I hope.

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Speaker 5: So, I mean that I could stand there all day and watch them because it's always different, it's always changing, and they're just they have so much to do.

00:20:00
Speaker 4: They're so busy.

00:20:02
Speaker 2: I always have to do in your meerkat.

00:20:04
Speaker 1: And it's totally applicable too.

00:20:05
Speaker 3: I mean, not just for our listeners outside of the zoo world, but for professionals that we work alongside with. I'm thinking for flocks, maybe an individual being introduced to a flock, or maybe a different mammal herd species. You know, this is a really fascinating way of approaching those things.

00:20:18
Speaker 1: So yeah, kudos to you guys. That's amazing.

00:20:20
Speaker 4: Thank you.

00:20:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny you had mentioned that too, because when I was reading the articles, like it reminds me of those team building things where it's like you're trust well, I'm.

00:20:28
Speaker 3: Not good to trust fall because I like to do the trust Ask me about the trust fall.

00:20:31
Speaker 2: You have trust issues?

00:20:32
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a little bit. That's another No.

00:20:34
Speaker 2: Talking collectively about get everyone together to solve a problem, and therefore you work together cohesively to solve that problem, you become a stronger unit of group totally. So it's one of those things where I can see how that would work, how that dynamic would work then for meerkats, and how it works in this stance, there's that collective thing we need to take care of or deal with. So right now, you're my buddy, and the kind of con mention with your brother. It's like, no one's going to come mess with my brother. I'll mess with him sometimes I will, yeah, but no one else. So it's really kind of cool. So how we can see some of these behaviors are fasting interesting, Like, oh my gosh, that's great. But it's like, oh yeah, that kind of makes sense too, right right. Is there anything that we haven't covered yet about mere Cash that you think our listeners should know?

00:21:12
Speaker 3: Do you have like a favorite fact too? I'm always like your number one favorite fact.

00:21:15
Speaker 5: That My number one favorite fact is that they lose about five percent of their body weight overnight overnight treadmill, which as they sleep, their metabolism is so high that they have to spend almost the full day looking for food which is when you think about that, that's a whole other reason why you have to have more than just two of you. Someone's got to watch for predators while you're out there trying to eat. And then when we have a pregnant mother, she obviously eats more. But then once she gave birth to the pups, you could really see her appetite pick up.

00:21:46
Speaker 4: And for anyone who's nursed a.

00:21:48
Speaker 5: Baby, they know as well, your your calorie intake has to be even more when you're nursing. Yeah, it's fascinating that they are obligate cooperative readers because they need someone to watch the pups because moms metabolism is so high she actually has to spend the entire day eating in order to just.

00:22:04
Speaker 4: Replace that calorie deficit.

00:22:05
Speaker 5: Wow, So she's only down in the tunnel with the pups to nurse them, and then the rest of her day is just looking for food, looking for food, and someone else is in the den with the pups, usually another female.

00:22:16
Speaker 2: You use a really fancy term. No, don't be sorry. I love it because that allows us to talk about it and educate people. Obligate cooperative breeder.

00:22:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, cooperative what you've.

00:22:28
Speaker 2: Described is that the matriarch has the pups, she nurses, but everyone else kind of babysits for her washy feet. What does obligate cooperative breeder? Mean? Is that just basically defining what we've already kind of talked.

00:22:39
Speaker 4: About, or kind of it's saying.

00:22:41
Speaker 5: You know, Meerkats are always thought to be these altruistic animals where they work together for the better of the mob, and that's what we say so often, But the reality of it is they're probably less altruistic than we think. They're probably require that many hands to make the work lighter, so to speak, and if they didn't have those other individuals, they probably wouldn't be able to reproduce successfully. So they are obligate in the sense that they have to have others in order to successfully give birth and raise the birth to adulthood.

00:23:09
Speaker 2: So they're obligated to act cooperatively so they can breed and therefore carry their genetics on. Yes, that's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome.

00:23:18
Speaker 4: Thank you for the same.

00:23:21
Speaker 2: I'm piece it together because I think a lot of times in our world, we know these scientific terms and we know what we're talking about when it comes to social behaviors, and we use these terms without realizing some people, especially those on the other side of the camera or listening to our podcast, need a little more frameing out of what that means. And then it makes sense, you know. And that's the beauty of this podcast and what we get to do. We get to talk to specialists like yourself who know this stuff inside and out. We can bring it them to those who want to learn this stuff as well. So thank you so.

00:23:47
Speaker 4: Much, so much, thank you for having met time talking about it.

00:23:52
Speaker 1: Thank you know, wonderful way to start season four. Thank you so much.

00:23:56
Speaker 3: I'm really digging the visual components and we bring up the and along with these adventures seas, it's going to be really great.

00:24:01
Speaker 1: And here right, Tim bucktoo in case the guests.

00:24:05
Speaker 2: In the background, it's zoo, right, sorts of.

00:24:08
Speaker 3: Animals, all sorts of mammals running around in copletingly our little kids over here and nearby as well.

00:24:12
Speaker 1: But there's so much happening. But again, thank you so much.

00:24:16
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you for having me.

00:24:20
Speaker 1: Well, I had no idea, you stress man. That's my new favorite word of the day.

00:24:25
Speaker 2: It was your favorite this morning when we showed up.

00:24:27
Speaker 1: That's such a.

00:24:27
Speaker 3: Fun word and so much behind it. Tea, right, I learned so much this episode.

00:24:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's what I thought was cool too, is the fact that you know, reading this article now, having the opportunity to talk to her. She's so for lack of a better term, hands in the dirt with the mirror cast. She knows everything about it, right, and so it's so cool to be able to have that opportunity here and kick off season four with this here at the zoo. Yes, it might be a little ambiance sound, but I think you're here in Timbuck two at the zoo is a great spot to maybe do some repisodes.

00:24:52
Speaker 1: Oh I love it.

00:24:52
Speaker 3: Not only is the auditory experience now with the visual component, and I'd see all these adventures and bring a mand along with us along the way.

00:24:58
Speaker 1: So I'm super pumped about that. But it makes me think, like, man, what are that going on? What's next?

00:25:02
Speaker 2: Let me actually go back to the end of season three where we talked to doctor Oliver Ryder about the Frozen Zoo.

00:25:06
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, right, so we.

00:25:07
Speaker 2: Talked him because we're teasing it. This year, twenty twenty five is the fiftieth anniversary of the Frozen Zoo. Oh, so I think we should go back to the Safari Park, okay and talk to somebody who knows a lot about the very beginnings of the Frozen Zoo to kind of kick off the fiftieth anniversary way. I like it.

00:25:20
Speaker 1: We get to go back to the park. I'm all about there.

00:25:22
Speaker 2: You go, Gar, so be sure to subscribing fun in the next time when we get to find out a little more about what started and how it all got started really at the Frozen Zoo.

00:25:34
Speaker 1: I'll Marko Went and I'm Rick Schwartz.

00:25:36
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening or watching. For more information about the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Zoo Safari Park, go to sd zw a dot org. Amazing Wildlife is a production of iHeartRadio. Our supervising producers are Nikia Swinton and Dylan Fagan, and our sound designers are Sierra Spreen and Matt Russell. For more shows from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.