Creatures great and small have been given the once-over at London Zoo as part of their famous yearly weigh-in.
From ferocious lions to tiny meerkats, all the residents of the zoo are subject to an annual check.
Carrying out weight checks and measurements not only helps staff keep an eye on animals’ wellbeing, but it also allows them to identify pregnancies.
Not only that, but it provides important information for their care, as well as for their species, as many are threatened in the wild and part of conservation breeding programmes.
The animals’ weights and measurements are loaded into a shared database called the Zoological Information Management System.
This helps conservationists around the world compare important information on thousands of threatened species.
In what has been a busy few days for the zoo, the annual event came just hours after a Banksy artwork painted there had to be removed for safekeeping.
The piece, which shows a gorilla lifting up a shutter and allowing a number of birds and a seal to escape, has been replaced with a replica.
A nearby sign reads ‘Banksy woz ere’ and offers an apology to any disappointed fans of the street artist.
The painting on the entrance to the zoo was the ninth and final work in a series of images of animals created across the capital.
Angela Ryan, head of zoological operations at London Zoo, said the weigh-in, which began on Monday and can take up to a week, will form an important part of gathering data to help protect animals in the wild.
Although the zoo houses more than 14,000 animals, Ms Ryan said the keepers will only have time to measure and log the weight of around 400 creatures.
She told the PA news agency: ‘Today is the annual weigh-in so it’s a day or a week long, really, where we’re going to weigh all our animals and make sure we’ve got it recorded on a database.
‘It’s a database called Zims… and that’s something that all zoos around the world use.
‘We can then share our data, we can check that our animals are all in the same kind of bracket, with their weights healthy, but also something that we can share with conservationists in the field, which is really important to us.
‘The research that we can do here on our animals is then used to help protect them in the wild.’
Ms Ryan added that the annual weigh-in, measuring weight and waist size, can help inform staff and veterinarians about an animal’s condition.
‘Knowing the stages of pregnancy, for example, the weight changes, and the time at which they change, is important,’ she said.
‘Knowing how an animal grows, making sure it’s growing properly. If it’s a young animal… they are growing and they’re a lovely weight and we can also look at their weight compared to how their body condition looks.
‘It’s also great to have a weight. If an animal gets sick, the vets want to know what the weight is quite quickly, so they can give you the right medication doses. Or if they need to do any anaesthetics, they can do them quickly.’
The zoo animals have different personalities, so keepers will be challenged to find imaginative ways to coax the creatures on to the scales, which Ms Ryan said is part of the staff’s ‘enrichment’.
‘Weighing the animals is enrichment for our keepers, especially in some of those exhibits that maybe have lots of different animals in there – like our rainforest, where we’ve got sloths and we’ve got monkeys and birds, and they all want to be weighed at the same time,’ she said.
‘Being able to split them all apart and make sure we get single weights for each animal, identifying each animal at the same time, can be quite challenging.’
Among the animals being weighed for the first time are three endangered Asiatic lion cubs named Syanni, Mali and Shanti, who were born at London Zoo in March.
When the work was first discovered, officials at the zoo used a Perspex cover to ‘protect it from the glare of the sun’.
London Zoo replied to comments on a social media post announcing the removal that ‘we’re still working on exactly what we’re going to do with the artwork, but we’re keen to properly preserve this moment in our history’.
Two of the other pieces in the series, including the silhouettes of elephants in Chelsea’s Edith Grove, have been defaced and another was stolen just hours after it was put up.
Banksy’s works across London since August 5 included a rhino mounting a silver Nissan Micra car with a traffic cone on its bonnet in Charlton’s Westmoor Street, a police sentry box in Ludgate Hill transformed into a giant tank of piranhas, and a pelican stooping to scoop up a fish on the sign of Bonner’s Fish Bar in Walthamstow.