Cases of peanut butter, bright red boxes of Shredded Wheat cereal, and so many varieties of tea that even Mary Poppins would be excited. Around the corner, large wooden crates teeming with wide leaves and sturdy grasses, and a walk-in refrigerator full of fresh produce sit ready to turn into dishes that are a feast for the eyes and the belly.
For the team working at Disney’s Animal Nutrition Center (ANC) at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, it’s like Thanksgiving every day. The roughly 40 cast members on the animal nutrition team is responsible for feeding the over 5,000 animals at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park and The Seas at EPCOT. It takes time, a devotion to the science of nutrition, and really knowing your audience to deliver about 10,000 pounds of food per day. And like putting together any big meal, it requires a team effort, which extends well beyond the animals at Disney.
“What we’re trying to do is provide the optimal nutrition for animals to live long and healthy lives, and we do that by taking information from a lot of different fields,” Animal Nutrition Operations Manager Dr. Heidi Bissell tells Popular Science. “From the field of agriculture, we learn a lot about animal physiology and how animals work, and can then design diets with the ingredients we have for specific purposes.”
In addition to bringing in knowledge from across different scientific disciplines, the team collaborates with other accredited zoos, aquariums, and universities to share research and data on animal nutrition. They’ve published studies on animals from bigger animals like zebras and rhinos, to smaller fish and amphibians, which is crucial to filling in nutritional gaps. If the team is not sure what a particular species needs to eat in order to thrive, they will turn to comparative nutrition for answers.
“We go with a close relative [and] take what we know about the animals we do know a lot about and apply that to some of our other species,” Bissell explains. “Then we learn from our own animals by assessing how they’re doing on the diets that we’re offering, so we can gauge their nutritional status and make adjustments as needed.”
Staying nimble and making these adjustments is also important. If a supply chain issue disrupts what the nutrition team can get, having a back-up plan that includes nutritious food is critical. If an animal is familiar and comfortable with at least a few types of food, they will generally fare better, whether there are shortages or not.
At the same time, the nutrition team works to ensure that the food and its presentation mimics life in the wild as much as possible.
“Animals in the wild are spending their days solving puzzles, trying to figure out how to eat, while staying away from predators or toxins,” Bissell says. “They’re making a lot of decisions all day, so if we just offered them food in a bowl that would not provide them with mental stimulation.”
One of the most common behaviors is foraging, or digging through obstacles like grass, mud, or leaves to find food. The dishes the team creates are often presented in a way that encourages foraging, so that the animals keep up those natural behaviors. Leaves will be hung up in a tree for the giraffes to eat as they would in the wild. Carnivores like lions will get whole prey and bones to eat, which also helps keep their own jaws and teeth healthy. The team also pays attention to seasonal shifts to keep animals in their natural rhythm.
“Probably the biggest group of animals that we do this with would be birds,” says Bissell. “If they’re laying eggs, they might need more calcium, so we might add sources of calcium into their diet.”
Surprisingly, feeding bigger animals like lions and elephants is not as challenging as making sure that the insectivores have enough to eat. True to their name, anteaters almost exclusively eat bugs, and can consume up to 3,000 insects per day. To keep up with all of those the bugs, Bissell and the team work side-by-side with manufacturers to ensure their insect pellets meet the physical and nutritional standards needed to align with insects the anteaters encounter in the wild. To supplement, the anteaters will also get a bit of produce with the insects, since they do also eat fruit.
The responsibility of feeding thousands of animals while keeping up with the latest knowledge on their nutritional needs is serious business. But the team has ways to make the food entertaining for humans and animals alike. Cookie cutters can shape special gelatin laden with nutritional supplements into shapes, while purees made from the foods that the animals already eat can decorate a meal to make it just a little bit more special.
“We do a lot with like ice cakes, where we can freeze food in blocks of ice and can color the water with like vegetable dyes, so it’s fun and engaging. And the ice, especially in Florida in the summer, is really nice for hydration,” Bissell explains. “We are often pulling from what’s already in the animal diet or similar things, because just like humans, it’s not a great idea to just add a bunch of stuff on top of your existing diet.”
They’ll also follow themes, from a little fall pies to a driver’s license out of fruit and leaves for a gorilla’s 16th birthday and a food sculpture shaped like a margarita for a 21st birthday. That devotion to keeping meals fresh and creative helps all animals, humans included.
“I like making animals’ lives better, and by extension people’s lives better, because we care about these animals so much,” says Bissell.
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Laura is Popular Science’s news editor, handling coverage of a wide variety of subjects. Laura is particularly fascinated by all things aquatic, paleontology, nanotechnology, and exploring how science influences daily life.
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Inside Disney’s Animal Nutrition Center, which doles out 10,000 pounds of food every day – Popular Science
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