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Zoos Go Online to Find Mates for Endangered Species

by Terrence O'Brien on September 14, 2008 at 12:01 PM

Digital Dating for Animals
We're all pretty comfortable with the idea of online dating for humans, but mating sites for zoo creatures might be a bit much for even us to swallow. Zoos have long kept what they call studbooks, printed indexes of animals ready for mating, but as with everything else in this world, studbooks are starting to go digital.

Ed Diebold, director of animal collections at Riverbanks Zoo, explains (to CNN) the need for studbooks: "In captivity, usually these populations are considerably smaller than wild populations, which is why you can't afford to allow animals to inbreed or breed along closely related lines." Many zoo keepers now search out potential mates for endangered species kept in captivity with a simple Internet search. CNN reports that the online databases contain information about age, sex, weight, and lineage, but tend to ignore things like turn-ons and turn-offs. Now, however, the online studbooks are starting to record personality details about the animals in hopes of better matching mates.

Currently, these manuals are often e-mailed back and forth and usually out of date. The new electronic databases will be easy to update and faster to search through. Though the idea of digital dating services for animals may seem strange, they may be key to the survival of rare species in captivity. [From: CNN]

Tags: dating, mating, online dating, OnlineDating, studbooks, zoo, zoos

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