The Zoos and Aquariums Currency
The Zoos and Aquariums Currency.
This is one of those strange topics I get into and found it fascinating.
Okay so this story begins in Canada at the Calgary Zoo, home of some lovely asian elephants which were there for almost 40 years. Sadly Canada doesn't characterize for being the most weather friendly place to live for animals used to temperatures much higher than the freezing point of water, so the Zoo had to find a new place for these elephants.
Animals, or at least the ones in Zoos, can't be put up for sale like you would normally do with your car. You can't run an ad in the newspaper (or The Hat Herald hehe) with a picture of your three asian elephants like "yeah a thousand a piece, come get 'em". That's just not something legal for Zoos and they have these ethic principles that they will never sell or buy any animal, becasue they don't want to encourage poaching.
In the past it was nothing like this. Many years ago Zoos did buy their animals, they basically went with "explorers" and gave them a list, just as the list you do when going to the supermarket, like yeah I'll take two silverback gorillas, three, no maybe four giraffes and maybe thrown in a lion. Explorers would then go to Africa or Asia and bring back all the animals requested by the Zoo in exchange for a hefty amount of money.
One of the most famous "explorers" was Carl Hagenbeck, I really don't recommend you reasearch this guy, he did some pretty terrible things to animals and even sometimes he would bring back humans, yup you read that right, he would grab Eskimos and take them to Europe and put them in display, such a terrible thing.
Well, all of this gave the Zoos some disgusting reputation which resulted in them slowly turning their business around and stopped hiring these "explorers". Years later the Government got involved and the buy and sell of endagered species was only permissible if you had a permit issued by the government. Said law or regulation, however it is called, had a little loophole, if you didn't use any money then you didn't need a permit, yeah you see where this is going.
Said law was specific for endagered species but the Zoos adopted it for all of their animals, they just took money out of the equation. So the business of Zoos shifted back to the stone age when money didn't exist and bartering was the norm.
Okay so just like Zoos, Aquariums turned into bartering and what happened here is amaizing. Aquariums developes as their basic unit of trade the jellyfish, so many aquariums basically just began breeding jellyfish, as if they were printing money.
The New England Aquarium has a lot of jellyfish, they are constantly breeding those big monsters so technically they are considered pretty rich in the aquarium business, every aquarium wants jellyfish in their displays.
So bartening between Aquariums takes a lot of time. You ask for some fish here and there, they ask you back for some other fish you don't have so you go ask for said fish somewhere else and by the time the deal is over there were 5 different trades going on.
Now the problem with bartening is that it sets a price. If you trade some pandas for some octopuses then people can get the idea that a panda is worth 5 octopuses or whatever the trade was. In order to avoid this from happening the Association of Zoos and Aquariums has set up an animal exchange website, obviously its private but the idea is you just post what you need, lets say 5 chimpanzees and then you post what you're trying to unload, lets say 3 elephants and then some other Zoo will contact you if they are interested in either offer.
So there you have it, Zoos and Aquariums don't use any money in their animal trades and the jellyfish appears to be the basic unit of trade in the Aquarium business.
If you want to learn more about this topic go to NPR's podcast "Planet Money" I don't remember the episode's number but I got this story from said podcast.
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