Selecting Good Students: Sherrington’s Frog Test

The second paragraph of Sir Vincent Wigglesworth’s (1899-1994) biographical memoir for the Royal Society reads:

His father was imaginative, encouraging his children to collect material for demonstrations such as the microscopic life in a drop of pond water or the circulating corpuscles in the web of a frogs foot. Many years later, V.B.W. mentioned the fascination of the frog preparation to Sir Charles Sherrington, then living in Master’s Lodge at Caius. He said he used it as the ‘acid test’ for identifying research students. Less dedicated students glanced down the microscope and passed on, but future ‘physiologists’ were unable to tear themselves away from the view of blood cells bustling along capillaries. 

I am delighted to report that I unknowingly passed Sherrington’s test too. I was given what was little more than a toy microscope around the age of fifteen and was transfixed first by watching the blood circulation in a tadpole’s tail and then a frog’s web.

An old school friend dug this out of his loft
before moving house earlier this year. We had
identical microscopes made by J & L Randall
under the trading name of SEL (Signalling
Equipment Ltd). The magnification was fixed
at 100x. My father made a case for both of us
but mine along with the microscope have long gone

Sir Charles Sherrington (1857-1942)
(Wellcome Images)

I looked for a good demonstration on YouTube or in commercial libraries; they can be found with a simple Google search. However, I was disappointed since the magnification used is sometimes too great and the ability to rack the focus up and down is missing. The extraordinary contortions of the red cells are evident as well as some of the jostling as vessels branch. But there is nothing like the real experience.

In the Wellcome Library’s collection I did find an old gem, made in 1923, shot in black-and-white. One of the photographers was August Krogh (1974-1949), the Nobel Laureate famous for his work on control of capillary circulation. 

Liddell EGT. 1952. Charles Scott Sherrington 1857-1952. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 8,  241-270

Locke M. 1996. Sir Vincent Brian Wigglesworth, C. B. E., 17 April 1899 - 12 February 1994. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 42, 541-553.

Herpetology in Britain: The Trio of Medical Men—Smith, Bellairs and Frazer

A fact, noted in a biography of one of them, is that all three authors of the editions of The British Amphibians & Reptiles and its successor in the Collins New Naturalist Series published from 1951 onwards were medically qualified

There was very little academic interest in reptiles and amphibians in Britain. Yes, of course, there were the famous herpetologists at the Natural History Museum in London but their interests in the 20th century were taxonomy and systematics, again not of burning interest to the biologists of the day. And there were those using amphibians to study developmental processes and basic physiology for which the frog is ideal. Comparative studies also included reptiles and amphibians but generally only en passant. Famous British palaeontologists devoted much of their lives to reptiles and amphibians but of the physiology, behaviour and ecology of living forms there was virtually nothing. Thus in a directory of research in British universities in 1960-61, only three individual entries refer to research in herpetology (other than a very specific interest in, for example, the structure of a particular organ) or developmental biology. They were: Angus Bellairs at St Mary’s Hospital (reptilian anatomy), London, Eric T.B. Francis in Sheffield (reptilian physiology) and C.L. Smith in Liverpool (amphibian physiology).

I think there are two reasons why research on reptiles and amphibians in Britain was not a topic of interest in the universities. The first is obviously the sparsity of species. The second is that research solely on one group of vertebrates, as opposed to a wider comparative approach, might have seen to have been unimportant in that there were unlikely to be discoveries made of wide biological significance. Whatever the reasons, it is not surprising that the major advances in reptilian ecological physiology, particularly thermoregulation, were made in the U.S.A. in the middle years of the 20th century where there is a rich herpetofauna and considerable academic interest.

The man who pulled all the information of British amphibians and reptiles together, including that gathered by very gifted amateur naturalists in Britain as well as in continental Europe, was Malcolm Arthur Smith (1875-1958). He was keen on amphibians and reptiles as a child but knew the only way he could pursue that activity was by earning a living as a doctor. After qualifying at Charing Cross Hospital and practice in London he went off to Bangkok as medical officer to the British Legation. That job was then extended to physician to the royal household. During his time in Siam, now Thailand, he was active in natural history, collecting specimens and writing accounts of the herpetofauna of south-east Asia. In 1925 at the age of 50 he retired to London where he was given space at the Natural History Museum. From there until his death he published extensively particularly on the reptiles of south and south-east Asia. From its founding in 1947, Smith was president of the British Herpetological Society. It was when he was over 70 that he turned to the British herpetofauna again, with the first edition of the New Naturalist volume appearing in 1951.

Angus d’Albini Bellairs (1918-1990) was co-editor of the fifth edition onwards of Smith’s New Naturalist book. Keen in reptiles as a boy he included zoology in his pre-clinical medical course at Cambridge. After qualifying in medicine from University College Hospital, London, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in north Africa, Italy and Burma, collecting reptiles throughout and sending preserved specimens back to London. After the war he published two papers with Malcolm Smith. One, on the head gland of snakes, read to the Linnean Society in 1944, must have been the result of work done while he was a medical student or while he was still in the army; the material was mainly that collected by Smith in Siam before 1925. The second paper, published in 1953, was on the egg-tooth of snakes. By that time he had been appointed lecturer in the anatomy department at the London Hospital medical school by James Dixon Boyd (1907-1969) who had been one oh his lecturers at Cambridge and who had stored Bellairs’s specimens from overseas. They published a paper together. Boyd took Bellairs back to Cambridge with him in 1951 but Bellairs preferred London and faced with a heavy teaching load in human anatomy he moved to St Mary’s Hospital medical school in 1953. Many anatomy departments had interests in comparative anatomy and Bellairs became the torchbearer for academic herpetology in Britain, albeit with an emphasis on anatomy, since he was self-avowedly ignorant of the advances in physiology, behaviour and ecology.

Joining Bellairs as co-editor of Smith’s book and then the sole author of the follow-up volume in the same series, Reptiles and Amphibians in Britain, Deryk Frazer had a somewhat similar history but this time came from medicine to become a professional working in conservation via physiology. John Francis Deryk Frazer (1916-2008) was born of a professor of anatomy at St Mary’s, John Ernest Sullivan Frazer (1870-1946). Switching from maths to physiology at Oxford he qualified in medicine in 1942. For the rest of the war he served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy on the new frigate HMS Helford in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. He then became Assistant Lecturer in Physiology at St Mary’s, a famous department headed by Arthur St George Joseph McCarthy Huggett FRS (1897-1968) engaged in fetal physiology and growth. Frazer worked on factors affecting fertility in the rat which formed the basis of his London PhD thesis awarded in 1953 (a mistake in a biography mistakenly attributed his PhD to work on toad movements). From St Mary’s he moved to the department of physiology at Charing Cross Hospital medical school where his main work was again on fetal growth and survival in collaboration with Huggett. However in 1959 he ditched academia to join the Nature Conservancy where he was a member of the British delegation at the first CITES convention. He did, however, continue his interests in fetal growth, publishing a paper in 1970 with the then late Professor Huggett. He continued his early interest in amphibians and reptiles into retirement particularly in Kent.

I knew both Bellairs and Frazer but only when writing this did I realise that Frazer was the older man.

Smith and Frazer from Contributions to the History of Herpetology (see below); Bellairs from Herpetological Journal

       

It was not unusual, of course, for those in medical practice to indulge in biological hobbies but the involvement of the the three authors was something on a much greater scale. Britain’s medical schools, which I have to explain were and are very different from those, say, in the U.S.A., produced many qualified doctors who did not want to become doctors in the first place but persisted under parental pressure, were attracted to biological research but who finished their clinical studies in order to gain a qualification, or who simply found they did not like medical practice once they had qualified. Direct entry into the biological sciences was often difficult especially for boys since biology was not taught at all in what were considered the good schools.

An example from our time as students in the 1960s was the famous insect physiologist, Sir Vincent Wigglesworth FRS (1899-1994). All his spare time as a medical student was spent studying insects. Medical graduates turning to zoology were always described as ‘having seen the light’.

Biographies of all three are in the three volumes of Contributions to the History of Herpetology,  edited by Kraig Adler, Society for the Study of Reptiles and Amphibians.

Frazer D. 1983. Reptiles and Amphibians in Britain. London: Collins

Smith M. 1951. The British Amphibians and Reptiles. London: Collins

The critically endangered Tamaraw: more bad news

I have written previously (here) about the Tamaraw (Bubalus mindorensis), the small buffalo found only on the island of Mindoro in the Philippines and of how I had seen one in Manila Zoo in 1967. When I wrote that article I had found that an attempt to create a captive-breeding group of this critically endangered species had failed. Yesterday I read in the latest edition of Keeper Contact (165, November 2020) that the last animal in that group had died:

Here is my old photograph taken in January 1967:

Fluorescent Platypus: any biological significance?

An interesting observation of fluorescence in ultraviolet (UV) light has been reported in museum specimens of the Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus); the fur shone green-cyan. The Platypus has thus joined a handful of other mammals in displaying this phenomenon.

The functional significance, if any, remains unknown. The authors come up with a suggestion that absorption of UV (with emittance of light of longer wavelengths) might reduce the animal’s visibility to predators equipped with an ability to see UV. How this might work in a crepuscular or nocturnal animal I do not know. Or it could it could increase visibility of one platypus to another platypus by shifting invisible UV radiation to the visible range as darkness falls. Or it could have no biological significance whatsoever, being merely a physical property of the fur that has not been selected against; an epiphenomeon, in other words.

An example I quote when talking about animal coloration is that biochemical pathways that produce coloured compounds may be selected against in animals that live in daylight. By contrast in the lightless depths of the ocean or in caves an animal can be any colour. It just does not matter. If a biochemical pathway advantageous to, say, conserving energy, were to produce a colourful compound as an intermediate, it would be of no consequence. Similarly, blind cave fish or salamanders are often white. Why waste energy producing pigment when nothing can see them?

As I was writing this Jerry Coyne has also commented on this paper here. He also raises the possibility that it is a biological epiphenomenon.

This is clearly a phenomenon to investigate even if it turns out to be biologically unimportant. I can already envisage a few Australians out in the bush shining a UV lamp at platypuses in the water. If I were there I would be. I like watching them anyway, having been lucky enough to see them wherever we went looking for them in Queensland and Tasmania.

I must also tell my physicist friends. Just what is it in the fur of these few species that is acting as fluorophore?

Anich PS, Anthony S, Carlson M, Gunnelson A, Kohler AM, Martin JG, Olson ER. 2020. Biofluorescence in the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus). Mammalia https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2020-0027 published online October 15, 2020 

Beale’s Terrapin or Turtle: An Endangered Species in Hong Kong

The freshwater chelonians, terrapins in English usage and turtles in American, of China and south-east Asia generally are in big trouble. Extensive trade for the human food and ‘medicine’ markets, the pet market, as well as loss of habitat have brought many to the status of ‘Endangered’.

As a result of reading a paper on one of the species in Vietnam I found a video taken recently in Hong Kong of Beale’s Terrapin, Sacalia bealei, where they are very rare and strictly protected. They are nocturnal, occurring in and around mountain streams. The location of sightings is being kept secret because it is thought poaching may still be going on.

Beale’s Terrapin was first described and named by John Edward Gray at the British Museum in 1831. Of the members of the Beale family who worked in India and China, the most likely candidate for the eponym is Thomas Beale (ca 1775-1841) a wealthy merchant in Macau who kept a large collection of exotic birds, including a bird-of-paradise, at his mansion. He with his partners in Magniac & Co (which morphed into the mighty hong, Jardine, Matheson & Co) dealt in opium, cotton and tea. For a time he was immensely wealthy but after dealing in opium futures and investing in some dodgy businesses in Brazil he ended up owing the East India Company the equivalent of many millions of pounds. His body was found washed ashore several weeks after he disappeared from his house.

John Reeves (1774-1856) sent the specimens back to London. He  was working largely in Macau as Inspector of Tea for the East India Company. Gray named Reeves’s Terrapin, Chinemy reevesi, after him, also in the 1831 publication.

The species is sometimes called Beale’s Four-eyed Terrapin because of the eye-like spots on the top of the head. However, since another currently-recognised species from further south in China, Laos and Vietnam, Sacalia quadriocellata, is usually known as the Four-eyed Terrapin, it seems better just to use Beale’s for the species from further north. Just to confuse matters, the two were often considered the same species with the Four-eyed as Sacalia (originally Clemmys) bealei quadriocellata). Both forms have four ‘eye’ spots. Mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests two species but I am not wholly convinced they constitute more than one’ biological species’.

It was not until 1977 that one was found in the wild in Hong Kong, or at least recognised as such, a point I will come back to later.

My mind was taken back to late 1966 or early 1967 when a lecturer in biology at Hong Kong Baptist College brought some terrapins she had bought in a market in Kowloon over on the Star Ferry to HKU. She left them for me to have a good look at. After I returned them she was going to release them somewhere in the New Territories. I know she was keeping a regular eye on the terrapins appearing in the markets and I suspect she rescued more. Unfortunately and infuriatingly, I cannot remember her name and our correspondence has also been lost.

The most interesting species she had acquired were Beale’s Terrapin which we could see seemed to occur in two colour forms. I see that this variation is now ascribed to a difference between the sexes. The male is what was called the ‘pink’ form, with dark brown or black with dark spots and squiggles especially on the leading edge. The neck has pink stripes and the iris of the eye is also pink. The female is the ‘yellow’ form; the carapace is yellowish-brown; the stripes on the neck are yellow, as is the iris.

We photographed the individuals on the roof of the later-demolished Northcote Science Building. Unfortunately I used Agfacolor CT18 film which deteriorates markedly with age. However, I have three photographs which are worth showing here. The ocelli or eye spots can be seen in what is obviously a female—a feisty female. She shot her neck out to bite the rubber gloves my wife had in her hand and was about to put on since she was trying to keep her hands dry while terrapin wrangling. The rubber gloves make an accidental appearance in several photographs at that time since her (wife, not terrapin) hands were suffering the effects of exposure to the histologist’s favourite solvent, xylol (xylene). The ones I photographed were around 13 cm or 5”, not far off the maximum length of about 18 cm.

Beale's Terrapin - male

Same individual as above

Beale's Terrapin - female
Note the 'eye' spots on top of the head

It was impossible to find out if the ones that appeared in the Kowloon market (we never saw this species in Hong Kong Central Market which we kept an eye on if in town) had been caught in Kong Kong or had been brought in from China. Since they had not then been found in the wild in Hong Kong we assumed they had been brought over the border.

More information and modern photographs can be found here.

This is the video I found:

While it is true that the number of people looking for reptiles in Hong Kong increased markedly in the 1970s, with many more species, especially snakes, being found, I cannot help wondering how many Beale’s Terrapins my friend bought in the market and then released. And did others do the same? So is it just within the bounds of possibility that at least some of the Beale’s Terrapins living in Hong Kong are descended from those released individuals? Could there have been an unrecorded but successful re-introduction?

Beolens B, Watkins M, Grayson M. 2011. The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

Karsen SJ, Lau M W-N, Bogadek A. 1998. Hong Kong Amphibians and Reptiles. Second Edition. Hong Kong: Provisional Urban Council

Le MD, McCormack TEM, Hoang HV, Duong HT, Nguyen TQ, Ziegler T, Nguyen HD, Ngo HT. 2020. Threats from wildlife trade: The importance of genetic data in safeguarding the endangered Four-eyed Turtle (Sacalia quadriocellata). Nature Conservation 41, 91-111. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.41.54661

I know who that is! J.B.S. Haldane—a new biography—and the editor of Water Life magazine

I was reading the new biography of J.B.S. Haldane by Samanth Subramanian to see if it could tell me anything important I did not know already. In brief, it did not (and I would take issue with some of the author’s interpretations of modern biological thought but that’s by the by). Feeling slightly irritated by the prose I came across a photograph on page 223 of Haldane with his first wife at a meeting of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1939. On the left is an almost complete face of a woman. She is not identified there or by the picture agency which supplied the photograph. I realised it was Margery Elwin, editor of Water Life magazine. I scanned the page to compare it with a photograph of Margery Elwin taken in 1937/38. I then asked others to judge if it was the same person; all agreed it was.

The photograph in Subramanian's book on Haldane

Left, Margery Elwin in 1937/38

I have written about Margery Elwin and Haldane previously here. The photograph puzzled  me because although they had been in contact in 1937 and 1938 by letter, she wrote to Haldane in 1946 as if they had not met previously. She explained that she was a member of the Communist Party and an avid supporter of the Daily Worker which she need not have done had they previously met. My guess is she sat near the Haldanes in 1939 but perhaps could not get round to introducing herself to the great man. 

In the 1950s both she and her husband, Louis C. Mandeville, worked for Haldane, she keeping stocks of drosophila and he newts with both working on fish. A link with Haldane was evident when she took his line in an article for amateur fishkeepers in defence of Lysenko when the latter had become utterly indefensible. Lysenko, a favourite of Stalin, destroyed the pursuit of proper genetics and caused the death of Vavilov, its leading proponent, in the USSR. The take home message is that then—and now—even the most distinguished scientists could be political activist first and scientist second. Subramanian argues, as have others, that in Haldane’s mind marxism and science were united, with the USSR as its faultless exemplar.

Subramanian S. 2020. A Dominant Character. London: Atlantic Books

How good at keeping and breeding animals was London Zoo in the 1950s? The fellows’ rebellion and the search for historical data

In my last post I described how data had been gathered to investigate the breeding record, survival of young and rates of mortality at London Zoo up to 1957. What is not apparent from the bland title of the paper is the political battle that was being waged in public within the membership of the Zoological Society of London, and that the data presented were part of the defensive ammunition in that battle.

The Zoological Society of London is unusual in that its ordinary members were—and are—called ‘Fellows’. One of the privileges enjoyed by Fellows was exclusive access along with their guests to London Zoo on Sunday mornings. However for this and other privileges the subscription was only £3 a year and in the mid-1950s had not been raised since 1832. The soon-to-be Sir Solly Zuckerman became Secretary in 1955, having been assured that troubles earlier in the 1950s had gone away. He soon discovered that all was not well. He found that ‘many fellows simply regarded the Zoo as a convenient, if unusual social club’ and that the subscriptions did not make up the loss of gate money from the public on Sunday mornings. In short, the fellows were being subsidised by the Society which was contrary to the Society’s status as a charity. To put the figures into some sort of perspective, the annual subscription would, in 2021, be the equivalent of two adult entry tickets to London Zoo. Given that entry to fellows and a guest was virtually unlimited and that the full economic cost of providing a restaurant and grounds for the exclusive use of fellows had not been taken into account, the force of the Zuckerman case is blindingly obvious.

The rebellion by some fellows was one of a number of the years against its own administration. It was brought about by the decision to open the Zoo to the public on Sunday mornings from 3 November 1957. The following months saw a rebel group formed and a long legal action against the Council of the Society. The details have been explained a number of times and I will not go into detail except to note that an initial ruling against the Society by an ancient judge which seemed crazy at the time and even crazier now was overturned by the Court of Appeal. Council and Zuckerman had won; the rebels were routed.

There is little mention in Zuckerman’s memoirs of the leading rebels but both the initial and final leader are worthy of a mention because their backgrounds in some respects are similar. The instigator was Henry Cobden Turner (1888-1970), usually referred to as a retired Manchester businessman. He was an electrical engineer and head of Salford Electronic Instruments (SEI). He and his team there either invented or co-invented the proximity fuse which proved invaluable against such targets as the V1 flying bomb; they were also involved in the development of radar. Turner was known to fight for what he thought were his rights. In the 1950s he formed a professional and personal friendship with Professor R.V. Jones CH FRS (1911-1997), then Professor of Physics in Aberdeen but earlier the key player in the ‘battle of the beams’, as described in his book Most Secret War. Turner’s letter to British and U.S. governments seeking financial recognition for the proximity fuse are held in various archives. Jones in a 1972 book review described what happened:

In a few cases, further research will be required before a definitive account can be given; for example, one of the principal originating teams of the proximity fuse, that at Salford Electrical Instruments under the late H. Cobden Turner, is not mentioned. This is a pity because Cobden Turner, as unrewarded a patriot as any I know, could have told a remarkable story (he did in fact receive a modest share of the proximity-fuse award made by the Royal Commission on Inventions; but in the expectation of receiving more had already over-committed it to the presentation of a stained-glass window to his minister-son-in-law's church).

In one of those infuriating ‘I wish I’d asked him that if only I’d known’ moments I corresponded with R.V. Jones and had lengthy conversations by telephone in the couple of years before he died. I would really like to have known if Turner had discussed his role in the Zoo rebellion with him.

Because Turner, having started the rebellion at the Zoo, lived in the north of England and was not on hand to lead the attack, leadership passed to another head of an engineering company, this time based in London. Reginald John Knowles (1898-1962) was awarded the Military Medal as a private soldier in the East Surrey Regiment in 1917; he had also been Mayor of the London Borough of Hendon in 1951-52. It was Knowles who took the ultimately doomed legal action against the council of the society and it was Knowles who was ordered by the court to pay half the costs; he apparently failed to do so. Israel Sieff and his brother-in-law Simon Marks then running Marks & Spencers picked up the hefty bill.

The gripe of many of the fifty or so rebel fellows was I noted earlier about their loss of privileges, especially Sunday-morning opening. However, there was another complaint not about privileges for fellows but about the performance of London Zoo as a zoo. The Times of 5 December 1957 reported on the meeting of the rebels:

     …during which several Fellows, in­cluding a former councillor of the society and Mr. George Cansdale, ex-Superintendent of the Zoo spoke regretfully of what they called a *grave deterioration" in standards. 

     Mr. Cansdale. who was asked to resign from his post as superintendent in 1953. and who is now associated with two com­mercial zoos emphasized at the outset that he had no ulterior motive in attending the meeting. 

     He went on: “The London Zoo, which was regarded as outstanding not many years ago, is to-day regarded with contempt by some of the foremost zoologists in the world. The management is grossly inefficient, breeding results are appal­ling, and in general conditions have sadly deteriorated.” 

     By Continental standards, Mr. Cansdale declared. “the London Zoo is very heavily overstaffed at all levels, from keepers right to the top. The council could achieve a saving of not less than £20,000 a year by proper economies.” 

     Mr. Turner, who said he had last year gone round the world inspecting zoos in India. Africa, and Australia, described the London Zoo as “now in the eighth or ninth place," instead of being, as it was once, the best in the world. The condition of the gardens and animal houses should be improved, he said, by spending the money raised, first, on the animals them­selves; secondly, on those who looked after them; thirdly, on the layout of the gardens: and fourth, on the secretariat.
     Mrs. D. Pinto-Leite, who said she had worked for more than 11 years in the zoo. began by genially informing the company “I only know about apes.” She had been a Fellow since 1910. The condition of the zoo now compared with those days was *appalling." she said. “I have no confidence in anyone there, from the management downwards, except a few of the keepers—and the animals."
     She was followed by Mr. A. Tabelin, who said he had visited the zoological gardens for 10 years. You go there todav and you find empty cages and animals in the wrong cages," he said.

The Council and Zuckerman clearly interpreted George Cansdale’s intervention as a continuation of the war with Leo Harrison Matthews FRS, who was not only Scientific Director but also running the Zoo with the help of just a secretary. It appears that it was Matthews who delivered the earlier ultimatum to council that Cansdale must be removed from office—a topic I will return to in a future post.

At the AGM of the society on 15 January 1958, Zuckerman launched attacks on Turner and Cansdale, neither of whom was present. He dealt with the question of Sunday opening and indicated that the subscription would be raised to £10. However, I suspect that after two years in post, Zuckerman was aware that the Zoo was in the doldrums but was not prepared to admit it to the rebels. Indeed Zuckerman’s proposals were the first steps in his plans for recovery. The gulf between the interests of fellows who were scientists and those who were later categorised as ordinary fellows was exposed by letters to The Times. The big guns came out in force in support of Zuckerman’s changes. One letter was signed by Sir Gavin de Beer FRS, director of the Natural History Museum, Carl Pantin FRS in Cambridge, Peter (later Sir Peter) Medawar FRS and John Zachary Young FRS, both of University College London, on behalf of over 150 zoologists who were fellows of the society.

Zuckerman did take Cansdale’s claims about breeding results and mortality seriously. It seems inconceivable that these performance indicators had not been a matter of regular report. Although Cansdale complained about the competence of the figures on mortality notified to fellows after Zuckerman’s blast at the AGM, he himself does not seem to have improved the collection of data while Superintendent. Nevertheless, two people were given the job of extracting as much meaningful data as was possible from the historical records. The first was Eric Hayton Ashton (1926-1985) a member of Zuckerman’s department of anatomy in Birmingham and one of his first B.Sc. students there.  The second was Gwynne Vevers, Zuckerman’s pre-war student at Oxford and since 1955 curator of the aquarium at the Zoo. They sifted through the records and came up with a series of tables and graphs. Figures on breeding on mortality are difficult to interpret because it depends not only on the quality of care but also on the balance of naturally long-lived and short-lived animals in a collection. However, the general trends were clear and their paper was published in early 1959. The main conclusions can be quoted from the summary:

• Apart from the period during the Second World War when the numbers of vertebrates dropped sharply, the collections have, since the mid-1930s, fluctuated around a level of some 5000 exhibits. The numbers of species and subspecies have, during the past seven years, varied slightly around an average of approximately 1200.
• Mammals now account for some 30 per cent of the total exhibits, birds for 60 per cent while reptiles and amphibians comprise 10 per cent. Approximately 90 per cent of the mammals and birds exhibited are from wild species.
• The birth rate in the collections as a whole now stands at 14 per 100 exhibits. The corresponding value for wild species is 11.8. These figures are among the highest attained during the periods for which records are available.
• More than 90 per cent of the animals born in the menagerie during 1957 survived to the end of the year. The average survival rate for the past three years is higher than at any time since the opening of Whipsnade Park in 1931.
• The mortality rate for the entire vertebrate collections stood, during 1957, at 21. This figure is less than at any time either before or after the Second World War. 

Zuckerman clearly could not resist adding a foreword which explained the reason for the study and stressed its main conclusions:

When trying to discover what substance there was to a number of state­ments about mortality and birth rates in the Society’s collections, to which wide publicity was given in the National Press, I made a preliminary analysis of the vital statistics of Regent’s Park and VVhipsnade. The results of this analysis, which were incorporated in the Report of the Council of the Society for 1957, showed that, contrary to view that mortality rates are now rising and birth rates falling in the Regent’s Park Gardens, the reverse is the case. Since this was only a preliminary analysis, I suggested to Dr Ashton and Dr Vevers that they might undertake a more detailed study of the Society’s vital statistics. The results are incorporated in the present paper…

     …The index which stands out most clearly as a mark of the Society’s progress in the field of animal husbandry, which we can justly claim is subject to stricter and stricter scientific control as every year passes, is clearly that of mortality, which gives a measure of the health of our animals. This index fell steadily from the beginning of the century until the early 1930’s, and then showed a tendency to rise through the Second World War, and the post-war years. To-day it is declining steeply, a change which reflects not only the value of the new hospital and pathological services which we brought into operation three years ago, but also the increasing use of modern clinical methods in the care of our animals. We do not know, and it is possible we shall never know, the natural longevity of most of the animals in our collection. We can only go on hoping, therefore, that this index will continue to fall. 

The results were further publicised by an article in New Scientist.

Below is the graph from the paper showing mortality rates. However, the figures were open to several interpretations. For non-domestic animals at London, the mortality rate for mammals had in general fallen since the Second World War to 29%, for birds it had fallen slightly to 21% but for reptiles and amphibians it had risen sharply to 67%. It was only when data from wild and domestic species were combined and figures for Whipsnade (with an entirely different balance in the collection) were included that the mortality rate in 1957 was calculated at 21%. For non-domestic species at London Zoo it was 29% and had changed little since 1946-48.

       

Any propaganda value to be derived from the paper by Ashton and Vevers was not needed. It was published around the same time, and the article in New Scientist a few weeks after, the Court of Appeal gave its judgement in favour of the council.

Those reading this article will have realised by now that while this longitudinal study showed a bumpy but steady improvement with time, there was no comparison made with other zoological collections in Britain or the rest of the world. In management speak there was no benchmarking.

Finally I add the wry note that while George Cansdale was concerned about the competence of the figures on mortality he should try finding the figures now. The anti-zoo lobby together with the news media always on the lookout for bad news have caused zoos to stop publishing these figures in their annual reports. In the zoos of the 21st century, oozing with political correctness and sickening anthropomorphism, animals must be seen as dying at a ripe old age or of some incurable condition. After the great advances in husbandry and veterinary care from the 1960s, I feel sure that performance has increased markedly in the best zoos of the world but I can find no data to confirm or refute that view.

…And if you think that was the end of the Society’s troubles you would be wrong. Zuckerman’s continuation and reinforcement of the practice of packing its council with powerful friends and supporters from the great and the good backfired spectacularly after his long spell as Secretary and then as President.

Ashton EH, Vevers HG. 1959. The numbers of exhibits, births and deaths in the menagerie at Regent’s Park: 1835-1957, and in Whipsnade Park 1931-1957. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1959, 489-514.

Ashton EH, Vevers HG. 1959. The vital statistics of zoo populations. New Scientist 5 (26, 16 April 1959), 

Donovan B. 2005. Zuckerman: Scientist Extraordinary. Bristol: Bioscientifica

Jones RV. 1972. Review of The Challenge of War by Guy Hartcup. Electronics & Power, October 1972, 366.

Zuckerman S. 1988. Monkeys, Men and Missiles. London: Collins.