Virtually all of the scientists we met with were women, but we tossed a couple of males into the mix just for variety’s sake. One of them, Michael Puzzo, is a field biologist who tracks mountain lions throughout Southern California. He joined us at our end-of-the-year campout at Cuyamaca Rancho State Park this past weekend, and brought with him all of the tools he and his team use to track, capture, tag, and release mountain lions. We also met up with Bob Cisneros, a hospital keeper here at the Zoo who volunteers time at the California Wolf Center in Julian. Bob did a presentation for our group about the endangered Mexican gray wolf and we got to wander down to the enclosures to see one of the Center’s wolf packs up close.

The campout was a great end to a wonderful year. We hiked, we sang, we ate s’mores, and we giggled into the night. The weather was fabulous and the company was great!

Special thanks to Wells Fargo, without whose support this program couldn’t exist. Thanks, too, to “Kathy-with-a-K” Myers, our programmer, and Camping Pros, who make our overnights so easy!

See you all next fall!

Cindy Spiva-Evans is an educator at the San Diego Zoo.

Girls In Science is a program for Roosevelt Middle School girls which creates science-based experiences with professional women at the San Diego Zoo. The program is funded through the generosity of the Wells Fargo Foundation.

My fears were completely unfounded. I learned that, conveniently, the seventh graders in the group had just finished a block covering genetics and heredity! They were in their element and understood everything our cytogenetics presenter, Suellen Charter, had to say! Suellen showed us three different karyotypes, which are photomicrographs of chromosomes arranged according to a standard classification. Real photos of real chromosomes! The girls could count them (southern white rhinos have 82, tigers have 38, and Parma wallabies have only 16) and were able to identify the X and Y sex chromosomes. One of the cool things about the tiger karyotype we looked at was that it had 39 chromosomes!! How is that possible? Well, this particular tiger, Nick, had a condition called Kleinfelder’s Syndrome, which meant he carried two X chromosomes and one Y! This opened up a fascinating discussion about why he was in fact a male, and not a female, even though he carried two X chromosomes. I was amazed how interested the girls were! (The reason, incidentally, is that one Y supercedes any number of X chromosomes to dictate gender.)

We also visited a branch of the CRES Reproductive Physiology lab that is still located at the Zoo. We were lucky to be able to meet with Dr. Barbara Durrant, the division head, and lab techs Nicole Ravida and Dianne Amodeo to learn some of the finer details of what it is that they do! The girls were able to see sperm that had been previously frozen swimming under a microscope, and discovered that, if you look verrrry carefully, you can see a dog ovum with the naked eye. The samples we looked at came from domestic dogs that had been neutered and spayed in local clinics. Rather than tossing the tissue out, the vets saved it for our lab to work with, which is much easier than using cells from animals here at the Zoo. Once freezing techniques have been worked out using the domestic dog cells, then those techniques can be used with great assurance on cells of endangered species.

We also learned about hormone tests that are run on the female sun bears to find out when they are cycling and how cells can be stained to see if they survived the freezing process. As we made our way back down the steps and out of the building, one girl turned to me and admitted, “Wow. My head is spinning, but that stuff is amazing. I’m glad we got to come here.”

Me, too.

Thanks to the entire team for an enlightening afternoon!

Cindy Spiva-Evans is an educator at the San Diego Zoo.

Girls In Science is a program for Roosevelt Middle School girls which creates science-based experiences with professional women at the San Diego Zoo. The program is funded through the generosity of the Wells Fargo Foundation.

Read more Girls In Science Weblogs.

We started each visit in the outdoor panda classroom, observing Mei Sheng and his interaction with enrichment that the keepers provided him. The girls were given data sheets and ethograms, which are essentially keys to the codes that the researchers use to document behavior. Using a timer that beeped every 60 seconds, we spent ten minutes documenting Mei Sheng’s behavior (and he had a wonderful time with the apple juice popsicles!) and learning how data collectors usually do this in two-hour chunks of time. The ethograms the researchers normally use are pages and pages and pages…and pages…long. Ours only had about six choices!

From there, we took our data up into the conference room and spent a little time discussing the different types of data that our team is focused on: animal welfare, enrichment interaction, play, mating, mother-infant interaction, and cub development. We also learned that female panda behavior changes radically when estrus is approaching, during breeding, and through pregnancy and birth, and found the details fascinating. So little was known about pandas before Bai Yun and Shi Shi arrived in 1996, every little thing our team learns contributes greatly to the general knowledge base.

The girls felt privileged to be a small part of this ongoing 12-year research project. Thanks, Staci and Pamela, for illuminating the finer details of data collection!

Cindy Spiva-Evans is an educator at the San Diego Zoo.

Girls In Science is a program for Roosevelt Middle School girls which creates science-based experiences with professional women at the San Diego Zoo. The program is funded through the generosity of the Wells Fargo Foundation.

Chloe is what we affectionately refer to in the ranks as a “Zoo Brat”—a kid whose parents work here and who spends an awful lot of time running around Zoo grounds. Chloe has participated in every program the Education Department offers and could probably run a few! But this day, she got to do a few things she’s never done before, and one of them was to be a participant in her mom’s pet program, Girls In Science (GIS)!

Her school, Benchley-Weinberger Elementary, gave her an excused absence for the day and she joined me in the Education Department. Being a good mom and mentor, I put her right to work programming GPS units while I changed into my uniform, then we set out into the Children’s Zoo so I could do some off-exhibit work with the animals I handle there. Chloe’s favorite, Inca the chinchilla, was out visiting a nursing home (see a blog about Zoo Express), so we walked through a couple of the off-exhibit areas and visited a few of her animal friends before heading back to the Education offices and eating lunch.

I though she would burst with excitement by the time we finally left on our walk to Roosevelt Middle School, where we picked up the GIS participants. Many of the students at the school who know me asked if she was my daughter. Chloe was a little intimidated by all the big kids, but very flattered that they acknowledged her! She went with us up to the Zoo’s hospital (see my blog This Is Where Stuff Happens), and was in charge of taking pictures with one of our digital cameras. She got to listen to her mom’s heart with a stethoscope and recognized the pulse oximeter as something she’d seen in a hospital before. She liked watching the girls do Big Girl things, too, and was very interested in the group dynamics.

Tired and hungry by the end of the day, we made our way back to Education to clock out and then headed home. She fell asleep about five minutes into the drive home, with a stuffed polar bear in her lap and a smile on her face!

Cindy Spiva-Evans is an educator at the San Diego Zoo.

Here’s a blog about another “Take Your Daughter or Son To Work” participant.

And she was right. The San Diego Zoo’s veterinary team seems to be surrounded by an air of mystery in the public’s eyes, able to heal the sick and full of knowledge about each and every animal, no matter how rare or endangered they might be. Visitors to the Zoo often want to know where the vets are based, how they learn about the animals they treat, and are intrigued when they see our vets and vet techs out in the Zoo “doing their thing.”

We were exceptionally lucky to be able to meet with Dr. Meg Sutherland-Smith this week. She has worked at the Zoo for more than 14 years and had loads of fascinating stories to share with us. The first thing the girls got to learn about was darting. The vet team uses darts to anesthetize animals that need to be caught up for treatment and will also use them to administer medication. Dr. Meg showed us how the darts work, how to load them with medication, and how to shoot them! A couple of lucky volunteers even got to shoot darts (loaded with water) out of both a shotgun and a rifle—aiming for a foam deer set up across the compound—and did a great job!

We also learned about monitoring patients who are undergoing procedures such as surgery or teeth cleaning. The Zoo’s vets use the same sorts of equipment that human doctors use to monitor heart rates, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, and breathing. We saw different-sized tubes used to help animals breathe while they’re sedated, and got to check out arthroscopes and special lighting. We all listened to our own hearts using stethoscopes, and hooked ourselves up to the pulse oximeters to find our baseline numbers, then jumped up and down and ran around to try to increase those numbers! We even got to see Dr. Meg tube feed a sick kiwi! This IS where stuff happens!

There is never enough time to see and do all Dr. Meg has planned for us, and before we knew it we were racing to try to get back to school on time. We were late—of course—but no one complained! Thanks, Dr. Meg, for an amazing opportunity to glance into your world. We learned that being a good vet isn’t all that mysterious; you just have to stay on your toes and keep your eyes open!

Cindy Spiva-Evans is an educator at the San Diego Zoo.

Girls In Science is a program for Roosevelt Middle School girls which creates science-based experiences with professional women at the San Diego Zoo. The program is funded through the generosity of the Wells Fargo Foundation.

Read a previous blog about a GIS adventure.

We learned that the basis for nearly all of the animal diets here at the Zoo is specially formulated biscuits or dried foods. These are supplemented with meats or veggies or fruits or seeds, according to the needs of each individual animal. Carnivores have higher protein requirements than herbivores, that rely more on fiber to fill their nutritional needs. Omnivores obviously require a balance of the two types of foods to maintain their health.

We learned that, when trying to formulate a diet for any given animal, the animal’s digestive tract must be considered. Herbivore teeth and stomachs are very different from carnivore teeth and stomachs, and they process food in a completely different manner. Because we already know the differences between diets for domesticated herbivores (say, goats or sheep) and carnivores (a house cat, for instance) we can transfer that knowledge to exotic herbivores (like giraffes) and carnivores (Orson the jaguar, for instance).

Those rules don’t always apply, though. Consider the panda, a bear designed internally to be a carnivore. It has carnivore teeth and a carnivore digestive tract. Yet a panda eats a diet consisting entirely of woody grass—bamboo! Sea lions are another example. They are carnivores, but they eat a diet consisting entirely of fish. Feeding a sea lion cat food and steak probably would not keep him healthy.

We are fortunate at the San Diego Zoo that we live in a climate where we are able to grow about half of the food that we need to feed to our animals. We can give them virtually the same food types that they would eat in the wild, with a few special treats thrown in on occasion.

Thanks, Dr. Schmidt, for spending some time with us! We will always remember the “Gross Out Word for the Day,” which was coprophagy. Look it up!

Cindy Spiva-Evans is an educator at the San Diego Zoo.

Girls In Science is a program for Roosevelt Middle School girls which creates science-based experiences with professional women at the San Diego Zoo. The program is funded through the generosity of the Wells Fargo Foundation.

Read other blogs about GIS adventures here.

We got an early start and ate our breakfasts on the bus. The nasty weather slowly cleared the further north we traveled, and by the time we reached L.A., the sun had poked its head through the clouds. Our entire morning was spent at the Tar Pits, touring around, speaking with a docent, and of course, hitting the gift shops. We learned that the Tar Pits don’t actually contain tar, which is a residue from woody material processing, but asphalt, which is a naturally occurring substance often found near oil deposits. The majority of the bones extracted from the pits are from animals that were trapped there between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago—the last Ice Age.

Many of the animals exhibited in the Page Museum have modern-day relatives, but one that doesn’t is the saber-toothed cat. Often called tigers, which they aren’t, the saber-toothed cat is classified in a separate group from true cats. Its lack of a long tail and a few other physical characteristics make it more closely related to a bobcat than to a tiger or a lion, despite its large size.

We learned, too, that the remnants we were seeing were actual bones, rather than fossils, which are made of stone. The bones are all darkly colored from the asphalt staining, but are extremely well preserved. We could see injuries that had healed, rodent gnaw marks, and even “pit wear” which is caused by the bones rubbing against one another while settling into the asphalt. The collection on display was quite impressive, and our docent was great at pointing out things the casual observer might not pick up.

When we had finished up at the Pits, we set out for a quick walk up to the Los Angeles Farmers’ Market, where we split into small groups and wandered around. The ride home was long, but warm and cozy, and we arrived back in San Diego tired out and ready for bed!

Thanks to Kathy Myers of the Zoo’s Education Department for handling all of the scheduling and logistics—we couldn’t have done it without her!

Cindy Spiva-Evans is an educator at the San Diego Zoo.

Girls In Science is a program for Roosevelt Middle School girls which creates science-based experiences with professional women at the San Diego Zoo. The program is funded through the generosity of the Wells Fargo Foundation.

JoAnne has worked for the San Diego Zoo for 17 years in various incarnations, but has focused primarily on animal husbandry training and enrichment. The GIS were fortunate to be able to watch JoAnne’s training session with Mei Sheng, the Zoo’s 2-year old male panda (and big brother of Su Lin). She explained the process of capturing behaviors and rewarding the ones she wants. Mei Sheng has learned that a click, called a bridge, means “good job” and is quickly followed by a food reward. He is such a smart cookie, in fact, that he was doing all sorts of things for JoAnne, even when she wasn’t asking for those specific behaviors!

We followed up the panda training session with a quick slide show and a discussion about training in general, and polar bears more specifically. Training animals for husbandry purposes helps to lessen their stress when certain procedures (such as weighing them, looking at their teeth, or drawing their blood) need to occur. When animals are trained for these procedures, rather than anesthetized, they are much less stressed each time an exam takes place, and are much healthier and happier as a result.

JoAnne and the polar bear keepers have been asked to participate in a study in hopes of learning what precisely polar bears can hear. In order to find this out, they first had to figure out how to rig a polar bear “head set” and how to ascertain whether or not the polar bears could hear each sound that was presented to them. After some very creative construction and teaching the polar bears to stick out their tongues, they are ready to get started. The bears will need to be exposed to upwards of 15,000 different tones before we will have a rough idea as to their hearing abilities. All four of the Zoo’s polar bears will participate in the study, as will the polar bears from SeaWorld San Diego.

A big thanks to JoAnne and senior keeper Kathy Hawk for taking time out of their days to accommodate our group of future researchers! We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!

Cindy Spiva-Evans is an educator at the San Diego Zoo.

Girls In Science is a program for Roosevelt Middle School girls which creates science-based experiences with professional women at the San Diego Zoo. The program is funded through the generosity of the Wells Fargo Foundation.

Amy’s group met at the Flamingo Lagoon, where we learned about the Caribbean flamingos, scarlet ibises, a crested screamer, and Matilda, the guinea fowl. All of the animals in this exhibit (that belong to the Zoo) are South American species that would be found in habitats that overlap. Matilda is NOT an official resident of the exhibit, but tends to hang out here with her peafowl friends because this is where the food is!

While Amy fed the ibises, we discussed the impact of wild birds on the Zoo’s collection. We learned that open exhibits like the Lagoon and the Marsh are heavily affected by interlopers. Local birds are aggressive with the Zoo’s animals, take their food, swipe nesting sites, and introduce disease. In fact, our little exhibits are like microcosmic mirrors of the world at large. Any time a species is introduced into a delicately balanced habitat, the potential for disaster is high. Consider what has happened to most of Hawaii’s native bird species with the introduction of cats, rats, snakes, and mosquitoes, and nonnative birds that compete. Many of Hawaii’s indigenous and endemic species have become extinct because they couldn’t compete with the introduced species.

Our time with these bird keepers was truly enlightening! Thanks, Anne and Amy, for taking time out of your busy afternoons to meet with us!

Cindy Spiva-Evans is an educator at the San Diego Zoo.

Girls In Science is a program for Roosevelt Middle School girls which creates science-based experiences with professional women at the San Diego Zoo. The program is funded through the generosity of the Wells Fargo Foundation.

Read Weblogs about the Hawaii Endangered Bird Conservation Program.

There are about 600 species of carnivorous plants (who knew?!) and the Zoo grows four different kinds—Venus fly traps, sundews, pitcher plants, and butterworts. We were fascinated by the different approaches to luring, trapping, and digesting prey. Christy opened up a pitcher plant leaf and we saw the remains of hundreds of bugs, stacked nearly 7 inches (17 centimeters) high! And boy, did they stink!

Many of these amazing plant species are endangered due to habitat loss, but you can find another small bog in a bright spot next to Bugtown–The Itty Bitty City in the Children’s Zoo! Visit either of the Zoo’s bog gardens for a look at some of nature’s most amazing plants! And no, we don’t feed them—they catch all of their own food!

Special thanks to Paul and Christy for meeting with us and teaching us about the ferocious ways of the Zoo’s carnivorous plants!

Cindy Spiva-Evans is an educator at the San Diego Zoo.

Girls In Science is a program for Roosevelt Middle School girls which creates science-based experiences with professional women at the San Diego Zoo. The program is funded through the generosity of the Wells Fargo Foundation.