THE EFFECTS OF EXTRAORDINARY CARE ON ANIMAL BEHAVIOR
A DISSERTATION ON DR. MEGAN ROSS, CEO AND SCIENTIST-IN-CHIEF AT THE LINCOLN PARK ZOO. IN JANUARY 2022, ROSS BECAME THE FIRST WOMAN TO LEAD THE ZOO IN ITS 154-YEAR HISTORY.
BY: CARSON VAUGHN
ILLUSTRATIONS BY DELPHINE LEE
Dr. Megan Ross wasn’t a doctor at all when she landed her dream job at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo in the winter of 2000. Just months before at Georgia Tech, she had defended her master’s thesis on Chilean flamingos, their “pre-copulatory dances” still fresh in her mind, so many “wing salutes” and “twist preens” and all that pairing data gleaned from the flock at Zoo Atlanta.
Now here she was, curator of birds at one of the most prestigious zoos in the world, a job so perfectly tailored to her own peculiar interests she still didn’t quite believe it. “It was the greatest job I’d ever seen,” Ross says.
At just 26 years old, her PhD was still waiting behind a mountain of dissertation work, and despite what initially felt like winning the lottery, Ross soon developed a creeping bout of imposter syndrome. She questioned whether the passion she brought for science and research was especially relevant to her staff at Lincoln Park, many of whom had been working at the zoo or in the field since she was a kid and whose work-day grind with the animals seemed, at times, to preclude the lofty goals of her data-driven approach.
Her doubts continued to peck at her confidence until she found her team one morning in a heated debate: Do the penguins show more aggression when river rocks are added to their exhibit? Suddenly her worries lifted, and she arrived at a revelation that would steer her career for decades to come: This is why I’m here.
“We could start using science to answer questions like these and then change our management based on the answers we get," she says.
Over the past 22 years, Ross has risen from curator of birds to zoo director and so many critical positions in between. And in January 2022, she became the first female president and CEO in the zoo's 154-year history. It's an exciting statistic, if long overdue, and one that's landed her in nearly every major publication in Chicago. Given that so few women hold leadership positions in zoos and aquariums around the world, I think it's important for me to stand up and talk about that, she says.
But she's also the first scientist and PhD to hold the position, and for Dr. Ross, the science always comes first.
Born December 14, 1973, Ross grew up in northwest Atlanta on a dead-end street with a tiny pond and an empty lot just wild enough to call “the woods.” Her father was a Lutheran minister. Her mother was a preschool director. Neither were especially “science-minded folks,” she says, but the woods were always calling. It was there, with her sister and the neighborhood kids, that she slowly fell in love with the natural world.
“I was always digging in the dirt, looking at the bugs, and picking up the worms—that was my thing," she says.
Still, she never considered that it might one day provide a career. Instead, always an athlete, she enrolled at James Madison University in Virginia with the goal of becoming a physical therapist. But that all changed after attending a lunch featuring Suzanne Baker, a professor in the psychology department who specialized in something called "animal behavior."
“That’s when I first got introduced to the idea that watching animals
and seeing what they do is a career, and I was blown away,” she says. “I
remember thinking, ‘Wait a minute. Are you telling me the things that I
do in my free time—that’s somebody’s job?”
She quickly declared a
second major in psychology and began streamlining her coursework toward
animal behavior, especially birds, “the taxa I liked the most.” (She
liked them so much, in fact, that when she was a kid, she had three
imaginary friends: Sasha, Blueberry, and Helen. They were all birds.)
She took a number of ornithology courses and engaged in fieldwork with
Dr. Charles Ziegenfus, who remembers Ross today, after a 42-year
teaching career, “as the most caring of all of my students.”
Despite her newfound passion, however, she graduated JMU without a roadmap. She returned to Atlanta, where she was hired as an executive assistant at IntelliVoice, a small company that created voice-activated software for cell phones. She spent just over a year there, but her passion for animals never faded.
Eventually a friend suggested she meet with Dr. Terry L. Maple, who had been charged with the monumental task of reforming Zoo Atlanta. Though Ross didn’t know it at the time, Maple was also a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology.
“It opened the door for all my students to get a very unique opportunity,” says Maple, now professor emeritus. “We had a tabula rasa, and so for 18 years, and even after that, my students and I just really changed that zoo, and we studied that change.”
Before she left his office, Ross was “single-mindedly” determined to enter the program, but it was hardly what she originally intended. She knew almost nothing about zoos and didn’t understand the critical role they play in funding conservation work or that many species would no longer exist without their intervention. And Dr. Maple, after all, was known for research on primates, a taxon for which Ross held little interest.
"I don’t know if you’ve walked around a zoo recently,” she remembers him saying, “but there’s more than just primates."
Just a few years later, Ross was neck-deep in research on the zoo’s Chilean flamingo population. Each winter, during the non-breeding season, the zoo divided the flock and moved them to warmer housing, but flamingos naturally exhibit long-term pair bonding. For her master’s thesis, Ross studied the effects of that separation on mate fidelity, a question that arose by analyzing the situation from the animal’s perspective—or trying her best—a practice that has since defined her career. “That’s what really came out of this,” she says. “How can we take that information and improve care for those species?”
Ross ultimately found that captive flamingo couples separated during the winter displayed just 52% fidelity between consecutive breeding seasons, compared to 82% of those that were housed together. Flamingo couples often preen and eat together and generally engage in social bonding activities. In the absence of that relationship, many individuals eventually sought it elsewhere.
"These data clearly demonstrated that there was an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ paradigm behind pair bond formation and maintenance in Chilean flamingos,” she wrote for her thesis.
Before she could even consider publishing her findings in a scientific journal, she was packing her bags for Chicago, chasing a job at the Lincoln Park Zoo that seemed far too good to be true. Regardless, she says, by the time she left Zoo Atlanta, conversations were underway regarding how to keep the flamingos together as much as possible. It was perhaps her first tangible win for animal welfare, but it would hardly be her last.
Ross finally had begun to find her footing in Chicago, buoyed by her aha moment with the penguin debate, when she began work on her doctoral dissertation. Researchers had known since the 1970s that birds can see ultraviolet light, and in more recent years they had discovered that many bird species that seem sexually indiscernible or “monomorphic” to humans are in fact very discernible to their own species due to how that UV light interacts with their plumage. Ross began to wonder how this affected birds in captivity, many of whom are housed behind glass that doesn't allow UV light to penetrate in the same way as the visual spectrum.
And so that’s what my dissertation data was really looking at. How does that affect birds, and how does it affect different birds based on their biology?” she says. “Are you a forest dweller, where you might have patchy availability to UV light? Or are you a savanna dweller, where you’re out in the sun all the time?”
She ran experiments, including adding supplemental UV to the exhibits of various habitat groups. She also studied how and where the birds spent their time. It quickly became apparent, she says, that most of the birds were spending more time in the areas with supplemental UV. Many species showed behavioral changes, too: more social grooming, and more courtship displays. “That by itself is important to know because they’re showing you their preference. And so as a result of it, we’ve added supplemental UV light and UV penetrable skylights to all of the bird habitats here that are indoors,” she says.
Her work didn’t just influence Lincoln Park Zoo. She soon began receiving calls from other facilities, and access to UV lighting is now considered standard care for birds within the Association of Zoos & Aquariums. It’s the sort of change that Sasha, Blueberry, and Helen would have heartily appreciated.
“It makes me feel great,” she says. “I love the idea that I have answered at least one very small question about how we can improve the lives of animals.” And soon she would help the rest of the zoo and aquarium world do the same.
”On a cool morning in January, Ross is outside the Pepper Family Wild-life Center at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Built in 1912, the stunning Prairie-style building—complete with terracotta ornamentation and intricate brickwork—recently reopened following a $41 million renovation.
“It’s definitely had a lot of lives, but this is the newest iteration,” she says, a blast of warm air lifting her long blond mane as she opens the front door.
Figuring out how to create an ideal lion habitat while somehow maintaining the building’s architectural and historic integrity was “a huge, daunting task.”
Inside, a dozen red-cheeked visitors mill about a massive hall with vaulted Guastavino-tile ceilings. A sleek glass wall runs the length of the building, behind which spreads a rugged landscape of naked tree branches and boulders (some of them heated) and grass. Though it’s not all visible to the visitors, the state-of-the-art exhibit offers the pride a variety of climates and microclimates, sunshine and shade, pockets of privacy, and elevated ledges from which to peer down on the unsuspecting tourist, engaging their predator instincts. Here, Ross highlights the latest real-world results of ZooMonitor. Data collected from the app before the redesign revealed that the lions spent half their time in the shaded areas of their exhibit, and half the time in the sun. When the zoo finally approached architects for the job, they mandated an exhibit with at least 50% shade. “We’re providing them what we think they would choose if they were given that choice,” Ross says.
Behind the glass, the pride lazes about the rocks: one busily grooming its tail, the rest contentedly observing the human passersby. Heads pressed to the glass, a small group of older women, regular volunteers, approach Ross.
“Oh, wonderful! Wonderful,” one of them says.
“Look at that,” says another. “This habitat is fantastic.”
“I’m so glad you’re enjoying it,” Ross says. “And the cats like it, too.”