Mammalian Collection on Noah's Ark: The Effects of Beauty, Brain and Body Size

摘要: The importance of today's zoological gardens as the so-called “Noah's Ark” grows natural habitat many species quickly diminishes. Their potential to shelter a large amount individuals from gives us opportunity reintroduce that disappeared in nature. However, selection animals be kept zoos worldwide is highly selective and depends on human decisions driven by both ecological criteria such population size or vulnerability audience-driven aesthetic preferences. Thus we focused our study most commonly bred animal class, mammals, asked which factors affect various aspects mammalian collection zoos. We analyzed presence/absence, size, frequency per each 123 families zoo collection. Our aim was explain these data using human-perceived attractiveness families, their body weight, relative brain richness family. In agreement with previous studies, found mammals significantly all studied components There higher probability attractive kept. Once kept, are presented larger numbers more On contrary, mean only affects primary whether keep family not. It does not number