MIAMI — Are you missing your phone? It might be in the digestive tract of an alligator.
Zoo Miami has noticed a disturbing trend. Human visitors are dropping or throwing their belongings — pacifiers, sunglasses, water bottles, coins, hearing aids, pretty much anything else you can think of — to the alligators, komodo dragons, hyenas.
And the animals do what animals do: Eat it.
There’s a price to pay when a zoo animal swallows something that comes from a human. For the animal. And for the keeper.
The keeper has the not-so-glamorous job of sifting through piles of poop looking for what’s left of your water bottle. And the animal might need emergency surgery to avoid a blockage if the object doesn’t come out in the end.
Just ask Estrella the komodo dragon. She swallowed a blue rubber water bottle with a metal carabiner. Estrella was rushed to the animal hospital in July 2020 for an emergency endoscopy.
But removing it all was difficult because the carabiner was broken. Gwen Myers, Zoo Miami’s chief of animal health, said the sharp edge of the metal ring made removing it through the esophagus tricky.
So the surgical team cut Estrella open and removed the bottle. It took a month for the giant lizard to recover.
Zoo Miami has a solution to what’s happening.
“Stop throwing things into the animals’ enclosures,” said the zoo’s ambassador, Ron Magill.
And stop dropping your valuables near them, too — and if you do, let a worker know immediately, the zoo says.
The problem of human possessions getting swallowed by animals has become so troubling recently that the zoo is renovating the alligator habitat to add a catch screen, to block your new iPhone 13 from going down a gator’s gullet.
The zoo has also removed all of the rubber mulch that was used throughout the park because it had become a part of the animals’ diet. A handful of mulch was just found inside a hyena named Maxi when the crew gave her a regular exam this month.
Another problem is guests throwing coins into animal pools as if they were wishing fountains. Coins pose the risk of metal toxicity.
“Please come to the zoo to appreciate our animals,” Myers said, “and respect them by being aware of the danger of something being thrown in or falling into the enclosure.”
Phones, bottles, more
So what becomes of all the items swallowed, lodged in or pooped out of animals? Let’s put it this way: You’re not getting back your phone, not that you would want the smelly thing returned anyway.
The zoo has a growing collection of hundreds of undigested possessions. Sunglasses. Rocks. And kids’ toys: There are even two plastic alligators retrieved from — you guessed it — alligators.
The collection is meant to educate visitors on what happens when animals eat stuff they shouldn’t be eating.
In the collection: a coin with a hole after it went through an alligator’s digestive system.
Then there are the visitors who deliberately throw things into a habitat. Signs that say “Do Not Feed the Animals” don’t only refer to food as we know it. Animals are “indiscriminate feeders” and don’t know the difference between food and a hazard.
Myers said most people don’t “do it to cause malice,” but animals could suffer if they eat something improper.
Meanwhile, the common “Do Not Feed” signs will soon be enhanced with digital boards.
“I am so disappointed that people are not reading these signs,” Magill said.
