The Great Bend Zoological Society’s annual meeting will feature guest speaker Emily Ferlemann and the vocal stylings of — Tigers.
Ferlemann is director of research for The Prusten Project, an innovative program that combines the fields of conservation biology, bioacoustics, animal behavior and ecology to study the vocalizations of tigers.
The annual meeting will be held at 6 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 14, at the Columbus Club, 723 Main, Great Bend. There will be a dinner and business meeting with election of officers before the program. The evening will wrap up with door prize drawings. Prizes will include a framed photo of two Bengal tigers who came to the Great Bend Brit Spaugh Zoo as cubs, Spirit and Sunny Delight.
Tickets are $10 and will are available at the Great Bend Brit Spaugh Zoo or online at goo.gl/TPNMcZ , but only until Friday, Oct. 6.
Zoo Society memberships are also available at the zoo. The cost is $25, which is good for an entire family.
What does the tiger say?
Sarah Shirer, secretary of the Zoo Society, said she’s excited about the upcoming program with Ferlemann. The study of tiger vocalizations in the wild could help save tigers from extinction.
According to the Prusten Project website:
Acoustic monitoring holds the promise of more efficient protection efforts and decrease in the potential for local crime rates related to poaching rings, as a more accurate census would allow law enforcement to focus on core areas. Collaborators from the Elephant Listening Project, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Panthera, and the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Lab continue to make this research endeavor become a reality while our team of citizen scientists provides us with the means to do so.
Spirit and Sunny
Sunny and Spirit came to the Great Bend Brit Spaugh Zoo in 1998 as cubs from Roosevelt Park Zoo in Minot, N.D. Mike Cargill, who was zoo director at the time, took the cubs to local schools and civic clubs to introduce them to the community. Tigers typically live to be 20 years old, and Sunny was almost 19 when he passed away in August. Spirit was a rare white tiger, and as such had more health problems. He died in 2013. All white tigers in North America are mutations produced through inbreeding that causes a number of defects in addition to the rare pigmentation. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums has banned the inbreeding of animals to cause rare color-morphs, such as white tigers, deer or alligators, by its member zoos since 2008.
