This is a continuation of a series that started with The Tortoises of the High Desert
and continued at The San Diego Wild Animal Park with Of hooves, horns and beaks.
This piece is the first of four photo-essays concerning the San Diego Zoo. Ungulates and their Friends will be followed by Lions, Tigers Cats and Panda Bears; Primates, Bears and Flashes of Color; and finally Tortoises and Trained Sea Lions.
One hopes that through the presentation of this series, some learning will take place, viewers will be entertained by the pictures, and a heightened awareness of our fragile ecosystem will be created.
Apologies are offered upfront about any poor photography.
So on with the show, good health to you...
We paid for priority parking at the zoo, not wanting to repeat any mistake from the previous day. Priority parking turned out to be not too far from the front gate, which we saved a lot of time passing through since we had already purchased our tickets.
We immediately got in the queue for the guided tour. The zoo's set up is quite a bit better. The guided tour lets you know what's where and your ticket will allow you to take express buses the rest of the day to whatever part you desire to see.
And we managed to see quite a lot of it, from the entrance to the top of the polar bear "plunge" (which, being up, not down, is in my opinion vastly misnamed). I'm afraid I almost gave up a couple of times on the climbing parts. I was saved by an escalator system and a special bus that runs up the hill. From there you can take a sky tram back to the exit. Or you could catch the tortoises and the sea lion show close by it. Your choice.
I had a limit to the number of photos I could take. The camera allowed between 50 and 55. That's not as many as I would have liked to have. I got no photo of the massive takin, the "goat-antelope" of the Himalayas, the national animal of Bhutan, in the very last exhibit at the top (that's a hotlink from wikipedia to the left). Neither did I get a shot of the tiny dik-dik from Southeast Asia, smallest of the antelopes, right across from it. Now that I am writing this piece, I regret that.
The Bhutan takin and the Tibetan takin are vulnerable. The multicolored (Myanmar and China) and golden (China) subspecies of takin are endangered.
I noticed later on another outing, when looking at some paintings from the Edo period about the Buddha, the Vedic gods, animals and landscapes, that some of what I automatically might of thought to be water buffalo attending the Death of Buddha could have been takin.
The takin and the dik-dik are both hooved animals. More broadly, they are members of what was formerly called the order ungulata, which now consists of the true ungulates, both even-toed (the animals of the cloven hoof are members of this order Artiodactyla, since two is an even number) and the odd-toed (members of the order Perissodactyla) and the order Paenungulata, the sub-ungulates. Examples of even-toed ungulates: pigs, deer, sheep, goats, Satan, camels, giraffes, hippos, antelopes, and cattle. The odd-toed ungulates include horses, tapirs, and rhinos. Oddly, the odd-toed ungulates are more closely related to cats, bats and anteaters than they are to even-toed ungulates.
I did not get any shots of a hippopotamus. There was a pigmy hippo at Sea World behind glass and extremely difficult to see. In writing this, however, I was amazed to learn that recent research in molecular biology has shown Cetaceans (whales, which include dolphins) are closely related to hippos and are also even-toed ungulates...ungulates who returned to the sea. One amuses oneself with the observation that they are the smarter of the ungulates.
In addition there are the sub-ungulates: the elephants, dugongs and manatees, hyraxes and aardvarks. Two of the five families of sub-ungulates are extinct and known only through the fossil record: the embrythopoda, which had an appearance similar to rhinos, and the desmostylians, which are the only known extinct order of marine mammals.
Be aware that new discoveries move these animals around occasionally. It was thought, for instance, that the hyrax might closely connected to odd-toes ungulates...sort of a missing link. Subsequent investigation of the amino acid differences in hemoglobin genetic sequences showed this to be not probable.
Anyway, back to the show.
The Bhutan takin and the Tibetan takin are vulnerable. The multicolored (Myanmar and China) and golden (China) subspecies of takin are endangered.
But hey! How about something about the animals I did get photos of?
Think of the cockatoo as being our announcer. He's the first animal we encountered upon entering. In case someone is considering owning one of these very beautiful creatures, consider this: cockatoos are monogamous. The fellow below on the left belonged to a woman who had to choose between having a husband or having a cockatoo. That's why the cockatoo is at the zoo. The cockatoo considers the young lady in the picture (his trainer) its mate.
On the right is Security. The meerkat sentinel had our backs as we entered the world of Ungulata.
The first stop was bactrian camels, the two-humped camels of the Asian steppes. There are 1.4 million bactrian camels, nearly all domesticated. The 950 or so wild ones living in Mongolia and northwest China are critically endangered.
I got a better photo of the black rhino at the zoo than the one at the Wild Animal Park. Although it differs as to parity of toes from the bearded peccary to the right, its not hard to see the family resemblance.
What is that below on the left? Aha. The next photo reveals it to be a warthog digging its wallow on a hot day, revealing behavior similarity to the rhino as well. Warthogs are not threated at all, but they have appeared in so many popular culture venues that every zoo must have some. Pumbaa lives!
Elephants are not true ungulates, but rather members of the family proboscidea. They are the only members of that family which are not extinct. There are two or three species of African elephants, which are considered vulnerable. They have larger ears than their relatives from India and Southeast Asia and have swayed backs.
Check the ears of this Asian elephant, which are situated lower on the head and much smaller. Also note in the second photo (which you could have seen better if I knew better what I was looking to show) the domed shape of the elephant's back.
All Asian elephants are endangered. The Borneo pygmy elephant is critically endangered. The Sumatran elephant is extremely endangered, with only 2000-2700 remaining in the wild.
From wikipedia:
65% of Sumatran Elephant deaths are because of human persecution. 30% of this human persecution is through poisoning because of fear of the animal. 83% of the Sumatran Elephant's former habitat has now been turned into plantations; this means that the elephant has to learn to adapt to new habitats if it is to live.
The giraffes are the tallest land animals, as we all know, and also the largest ruminants (cud-chewing mammal). All ruminants are even-toed ungulates. They are sometimes better known to humans by their food names: beef, veal, pork, ham, bacon, rack of lamb, mutton, curried goat, wild game...
Needless to say that humans have treated ungulates as our own personal slaves as well. Family giraffidae consists of the giraffes, which are conservation dependent and the okapi, which are threatened.
The giraffes inspired me to get a lot of photos. The first row has as much of the family as I could catch at one time and my favorite of the pics I took: father and child (identifies sex using the fact that males have darker spots, we were informed). The second row has two teenagers in the first photo and a female passing a male in the second. The third row displays a giraffe in motion and a close-up of the baby.
The gazelles share the giraffe exhibit. You can see one in the group shot above. The gazelle is an ungulate as well.
Gazelle's disappeared from Europe during the Ice Age. The Arabian gazelle was hunted to extinction in its Saudi Arabian habitat, the last one seen in 1825. Carcasses of red gazelle were last sighted in the bazaars of Algeria in 1895. The Queen of Sheba gazelle from Yemen has not been seen since 1951. A private collection in Qatar claims to have some.
The Dama gazelle of the Sahara desert is critically endangered due to destruction of its habitat. The endangered Rhim gazelle of the central Sahara is in serious decline. It is hunted for sport and its horns are sold as ornaments. Cuvier's gazelle of Northern Africa is also endangered, with a population of only around 2000. Speke's Gazelle from the Horn of Africa has recently moved from threatened to endangered, though there is a captive population. All other species/subspecies of gazelles are threatened or conservation dependent.
On the right is a guanaco. They are in the camel family and live in the Andes. Domestic guanacos are known as llamas. Guanacos are the largest mammals found in South America and have only one non-human predator, the puma. Guanacos spit when threatened.
Since we have found their fur useful, they are not endangered.
Photos of whales, dolphins and another ungulate which returned to the water, the manatee, will come in their time. I saw no hyraxes. The photo of the aardvark didn't come out. Standing in its stead, since aardvarks are often referred to as anteaters, is an actual anteater...but the collared anteater from Central and South America (aka tamandua) is not an ungulate, but is rather related to sloths.
The next selection of photos was going to be just pandas. But in the interest of finishing sooner, they'll be shown with as many kinds of cats I can herd together.