She Works Hard For the Money
Issue #23
This Chicagoan runs a dating service for zoo animals
By Amber Drea
Published: March 1st, 2005 | 4:00pm
Name: Sarah Long
Location: Chicago
Occupation: Population biologist at Lincoln Park Zoo
Job description: “So what I do is basically family planning and match-making. The animals at zoos all around the country need new partners occasionally or they would get inbred. So I try to figure out who is related and we try to keep everyone breeding equally so everybody has the same number of descendents in the North American population. It cuts back on importing, ideally — we don’t want to keep taking from the wild. I work with chimps, reptiles, birds, all kinds of mammals, [but no fish or marine life yet because they are managed differently]. I’ve done maybe 50 different species and even more will be coming our way. There’s about 400 managed populations [in North America].”
How she started: “Four years ago, they started the population management center [at Lincoln Park Zoo], and it’s funded by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association. My coworker [and I] are the first two full-time people doing this for North American zoos.”
All in a day’s work: “I work behind a computer. I get the animal’s information — their birthdays, who their mom and dad were — and we put all that together in some software, and we trace them back to the wild, ideally. So I make my plan based on the data and we talk about it in terms of animal behavior or animal welfare. Then we have a 30-day comment period, and the curators make the decision, yes or no, [the animals are] moved or shipped if they have to be, and the keepers put them together.”
Made for the trade: “I always liked animals. I wanted to study animal behavior, but there aren’t a lot of jobs in that, so this was a way to work near animals and use my brain and work in a city. They hired me because I have a master’s in biology, and I studied ecology and statistics. I did an internship at Brookfield Zoo, and I have computer skills and diplomatic ability, too.”
The hard part: “Making everyone happy. Everyone wants to have babies and you don’t have enough room for that in a captive population.”
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