London zoo animal count - 13th January 2023

London Zoo has lots of animals. Every year the zookeepers count the animals. It's an important job.

The zoo's famous. It has 14,000 animals. This year, some new animals arrived. Zoo manager Dan Simmonds is excited about them.

Dan Simmonds: 'Probably the star of the show has been our western lowland gorilla, silverback gorilla, Kiburi, who's been introduced to our resident gorillas here and is doing incredibly well. We had two tiger cubs, we had 10 Humboldt penguins, some of which were actually hand-reared by keepers here. So, generally it's been a really exciting time at the zoo and numbers growing.'

Some animals are big, and some are small. There are big gorillas and small frogs. The zookeepers have to count all the animals. It's hard to count the small ones. Zookeepers count the animals in different ways. They take photos of the fish. They don't count every ant. They count the different groups of ants.

The keepers play games with some of the animals. They count them at the same time. The animals have fun. The information is very important for many zoos.

Dan Simmonds: 'So it's really important that we keep a accurate record of all the animals that we have here at the zoo. We record that onto something that's called ZIMS - Zoological Information Management System - and we share that globally with all of the zoos that we cooperate with around the whole world. And that's a really important part of the management of our captive breeding programs.'

The stocktake's very useful. It's important to find out about the new animals. The zoo can build bigger areas for them to live.