Review social group sizes.
- Thread starter mondo1748
- Start date
Snow leopards are solitary by nature and like all cats are fiercely territorial. Planet Zoo has it right with them.
Some of the animal group sizes are far too small/far too simplistic, though. Snow leopards just aren't one of them.
I realize they are solitary animal's but it also doesnt seem to bother them much either at my local zoo either.
I guess gators is another example. Disney's animal kingdom has around 20 of them
What zoos are these that you are talking about?
I think that the social group size should be depend on habitat size. It is strange that you can only have 2 tigers in a 1k m2 habitat and 10k m2 habitat. Maybe you can set something like 2 tigers per 1k m2 habitat. It is logical that larger habitat could accommodate more animal
Not really. In the wild the average size of a tiger's territory ranges between 60km2 and 100km2. Like I said before, I totally agree that some of the animals group sizes are all wrong (primarily the herbivores, primates, and hyenas), but with the examples listed so far (snow leopards and tigers) Frontier got it right. If they really wanted to push for total realism, you wouldn't be able to even keep two tigers together outside of breeding season, but because breeding isn't (and can't be) tied to the game's clock, I can see why they avoided this particular aspect of zoo management.
What we really need is to be able to keep more than one male per group with most of the major herbivores without fighting (or at least without fighting to the point of injury and vet attention literally every time) and to keep these animals in bigger groups (especially, for example, the zebras).
Exactly
Off hand right now I can only recall one of the zoos the Brookfield zoo
It also really bugs me that some social groups are just outright wrong. Why did the lemurs get a copy/pasted "alpha male" primate structure when they're KNOWN for being not just matriarchal, but also quite fluid in their social groups! Only being able to keep one male lemur is ridiculous.
Really I think social groups should be more robust than they are. Completely turning off the desire to reproduce in "beta animals" really limits the possibilities. Chester Zoo's brief trio of bush dog "alphas" comes to mind. I wish we had a chance for random, abnormal things to happen. If the animals aren't hurting each other, zoos tend not to intervene!
Really I think social groups should be more robust than they are. Completely turning off the desire to reproduce in "beta animals" really limits the possibilities. Chester Zoo's brief trio of bush dog "alphas" comes to mind. I wish we had a chance for random, abnormal things to happen. If the animals aren't hurting each other, zoos tend not to intervene!
Brookfield Zoo only has two adult snow leopards, named Malaya and Buck, and as of August 2020 they had a single cub born.
I've never had issues housing multiple male lemurs in a group in the game, though there's a point where the habitat gets overcrowded. Lemurs have matriarchs as leaders, but males do compete to impress the females with ring tailed lemurs, at least. They used their tails to flick odor around. I guess the stinkiest tail tends to get the girls, which doesn't sound terribly dangerous.
The western chimps in the game, however, are annoying. IRL they do indeed have multiple males in mixed sex groups (males tend to stay in their birth groups and females are more likely to disperse). A dominance hierarchy within a given sex also does not mean the animals are constantly fighting to the point of injury or death. Conflict is often resolved via ritualized displays, and the top ranking animal may actually fight less than the subordinates. In fact hierarchies evolved in many species to reduce fighting.
The National Institutes of Health and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (in the US) recommend that captive chimpanzees be housed in multi-male, multi-female, age-diverse groups of no less than seven individuals, and recent research provides at least some support for these recommendations.
I think they stuck the gorilla behavioral model onto the western chimps for some reason.
I think they are also the least aggressive Chimpanzee Subspecies, so it's even more ridiculous how often they fight. Of course even between Chimpanzees in the same Group, Fights (even very brutal ones) can happen, so maybe they could introduce a new Feature which varies how often different Species fight. I do also hope if we'll ever get the promised Personalitys, that some Animals just won't get along so for Example Chimpanzee A and Chimpanzee B always attack Chimpanzee C so it would either need to be kept in a different Enclosure or transfered to another Zoo
A lot of the dynamics within a species would be influenced by things like habitat design and space too, of course. More space and a spatial lay out that allows animals to hide from bullies or avoid individuals with whom they do not "get along" with makes a difference in real life.
I remember reading an article about primate husbandry that mentioned many monkey species each needing their own food dish, because the stronger animals will bully the weaker ones and swipe their food if they have to share. Makes sense. I don't feed my three dogs out of the same dish at mealtimes!
In the game, of course, the keepers dump the food in large piles and the animals finish much more quickly than they do in real life. I suppose it would make it less efficient game wise to have the keepers put food out in a more realistic way, given how long it takes them in relative game time to prepare and deliver the food.
I remember reading an article about primate husbandry that mentioned many monkey species each needing their own food dish, because the stronger animals will bully the weaker ones and swipe their food if they have to share. Makes sense. I don't feed my three dogs out of the same dish at mealtimes!
In the game, of course, the keepers dump the food in large piles and the animals finish much more quickly than they do in real life. I suppose it would make it less efficient game wise to have the keepers put food out in a more realistic way, given how long it takes them in relative game time to prepare and deliver the food.