Show Your Fangs for the Camera!

By Claudia Zequeira

Sept. 6, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

While searching for a Bay Area hotel a few weeks ago, Laurie Deddens insisted that its business center have Internet access.

After all, how else could she watch the giant pandas?

“They’re so cute.... Whenever I have down time, I go check what the latest is,” Deddens said. “There’s news every day.”

The news comes to her computer from live Web cameras -- one in San Diego, one in Washington, D.C., -- trained on two panda moms and their new cubs. Deddens keeps the cams on all day, hoping to catch the pandas tending their young.

She is not alone. Web cams have been rolling in American zoos since the late 1990s -- reality TV with claws and fur for millions of animal fans across the globe. For zoos competing for the attention and dollars of the public, the cams are practically mandatory.

“We’ve created an expectation that this is something a viewer should see on our site,” said Inigo Figuracion, Web master at the San Diego Zoo. The zoo, which installed its first Internet camera in 1999, now has a polar bear cam, an ape cam and an elephant cam, along with Deddens’ favorite, the panda cam.

The National Zoo, in Washington, D.C., has a herd of cams capturing the movements, or snoozing, of 18 different species. There are cams for highly popular animals, such as Sumatran tigers and cheetahs, but also for the oddly appealing -- black-footed ferrets and naked mole rats.

And people are watching.

The July 9 birth of a male panda cub at the National Zoo generated 637,000 visits to the zoo’s panda Web page over a three-day period, said Peper Long, a zoo spokeswoman. The heavy flow of virtual visitors eager to view Mei Xiang and her baby caused the zoo’s cameras to crash for days.

“While people were watching and were interested in Mei Xiang’s pregnancy, it was nothing like when the cub was born,” Long said.

True, other cams are more popular. A NASA cam got 2.4 million hits during the recent Discovery shuttle launch. But the zoo cam fans are a dedicated bunch. San Diego Zoo officials noticed an odd spike in panda cam hits late at night in July. They realized the viewers were from the United Kingdom and were logging on when they arrived at work.

Animal fans will wait, sometimes for weeks, to catch a glimpse, sometimes fleeting and blurry, of their favorite species. After seeing Mei Xiang’s cub on camera for the first time this month, Deddens was so excited she freeze-framed the image and e-mailed it to close friends.

“I could see, in the curve of her arm, something moving and I knew that was it,” she said. “The thing that was really thrilling to me was to see the mother pick up her little cub ... she was so gentle with it. Such a good mom.”

Before streaming video was a technological reality, many zoos were filming animals for research or to track their health, making Internet video a logical next step.

But not all cams are created equal, and sometimes they demand patience.

The cameras tend to focus on one spot, and a viewer can wait a long time before a flamingo or octopus or golden lion tamarin wanders into the frame. At Sea World in San Diego, the orca cam captures a grainy undulating blue square occasionally eclipsed by the fleeting black shape of the killer whale.

But watching the cams can be strangely addictive. In the business center of her Los Gatos hotel, Deddens attracted a crowd of onlookers.

“People would walk by and say, ‘What are you looking at?’ ” she said. “They had heard about the babies, but they didn’t know you could look at them.”

But because the lighting is often kept low to avoid disturbing the animals, some creatures look like furry blobs. On the panda cams, the round black ears are sometimes the only clues indicating the head.

None of the limitations matter to Chet Chin, an avid panda viewer who logs on in Malaysia. “I don’t really care what the image looks like,” Chin said in an e-mail. “I enjoy the experience of watching their lives. Especially when there’s a mother and her cub.”

The San Diego pandas so captivated Chin that she visited the zoo in 2001 just to see Hua Mei, the then-2-year-old female Chin had monitored since birth.

Deddens also had watched Hua Mei since birth and now would like to travel to China. “I miss her and want to see her,” said Deddens of Hua Mei, now housed at the Wolong Giant Panda Breeding and Research Center. “I heard she might be a mom again.”

Deddens was right. Chinese officials announced that Hua Mei gave birth to twins Aug. 29. (She also gave birth to twins in September 2004.)

Hoping Internet traffic would lead to visits like Chin’s, some zoos vamped up their technology by adding broadband capabilities, buying servers and hiring Web staff. These upgrades, some say, raised viewers’ expectations of what a zoo website should look like.

“The first introduction many people will have with a zoo will be on the Web,” said Jane Cross, a Web team manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “If you look like you don’t have your act together, what does it say about your institution?”

Surveys conducted by the aquarium, she said, prove the importance of having a strong website. In 2005, she said, 40% of visitors reported that the aquarium’s website influenced their decision to travel there. In 2003, that number was 25%.

But having a Web camera doesn’t always translate into higher attendance or donations. Despite several camera additions, the San Diego Zoo was unable to staunch a drop in yearly visitors, which dropped from 3.5 million to 3.2 million in 2001 and has remained stable since.

Perhaps because a precise link between animal cameras and attendance has not been established, some zoos have chosen to invest limited funds in other improvements. The Los Angeles Zoo, which lacks live animal cameras, recently built a sea lion exhibit.

“The fact you can see something on a camera doesn’t necessarily translate into people visiting your zoo,” said Jane Ballentine, with the American Zoo and Aquarium Assn. “A lot of this [Internet traffic] has to do with curiosity ... and immediate gratification.”

New media expert Jeffrey Cole agrees.”Before you could go to a library and get a book and wait for National Geographic or a handful of television channels to do a special,” said Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC’s Annenberg School for Communications. “Now, if you’re interested in pandas, you don’t have to wait.”

But the cameras go beyond fulfilling a whimsical desire. Rather, he said, they answer to a basic human need.

“It’s sort of a security impulse,” he said. “It’s like saying, ‘My world is OK when the pandas are OK.’ ”

And reassurance is exactly what Koen Bogaert wants.

Bogaert, who works for a software company in Belgium, keeps several animal Web cams on his Internet “favorites” menu. In an e-mail, he referred to the cameras as “my free Prozac,” with the added benefit of being safer to view at the office than “pictures of women with clothing problems.”

Among his favorite animal cams? The penguin cam at a Canadian zoo, the Biodome de Montreal, and two independently run live Web feeds where he watches chickens.

Living in a third-floor apartment in Ghent and working nine hours a day in front of a computer, he said, “is not exactly the place to release the Old MacDonald in you.... This is pure, innocent amusement.”

The chickens even inspired him to get closer to nature. For his 37th birthday last month, Bogaert received a henhouse he keeps at a country home. Come September, he and his girlfriend will welcome Thelma and Louise, two newly acquired chickens he says will provide real-time entertainment for years to come.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Watching the animals

Here’s a sampling of Web cams operating at zoos and aquariums.

National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/webcams

San Diego Zoo

sandiegozoo.org/videos

Sea World San Diego

www.seaworld.com/seaworld/ca/of_shark_webcam.aspx

www.shamu.com/ca/shamu-cam/index.htm

Monterey Bay Aquarium

www.mbayaq.org/efc/cam_menu.asp