Zoos and Zookeeping
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97 free Zoos and Zookeeping trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
10 free zoos and zookeeping trivia questions with answers. Explore the fascinating world of zoos and zookeeping with our engaging trivia quiz. Test your knowledge about animal care, habitat management, and conservation efforts that zoos undertake worldwide. Whether you're a wildlife enthusiast or curious about zoo operations, this quiz will challenge what you know about these important institutions.
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Q 01In which city is Tiergarten Schönbrunn, the world's oldest zoo, open since 1752?
Vienna
Vienna: Emperor Francis I had the menagerie laid out at Schönbrunn Palace with enclosures fanning out from a central pavilion, where the imperial couple at times took breakfast with the animals in view.
Q 02Which training method lets zookeepers draw blood from a lion's tail without putting the cat under anaesthesia?
Positive reinforcement
Positive reinforcement: keepers reward each small step with food until the cat lies against the mesh and slides its tail through by choice, sparing it the stress of being knocked out for a check-up.
Q 03What does the accrediting body AZA stand for?
Association of Zoos and Aquariums
Association of Zoos and Aquariums: formed in 1924 as an offshoot of a park executives' institute, it makes every member zoo earn its accreditation again every five years.
Q 04The vaquita, target of a failed 2017 captive-rescue attempt, is what kind of marine mammal?
Porpoise
Porpoise: the vaquita, the smallest member of the whale and dolphin order, is vanishing because it drowns in gillnets set illegally for the totoaba, a fish of about its own size.
Q 05Under which programme, launched in 1981, do AZA zoos pair and swap threatened animals to keep captive populations genetically healthy?
Species Survival Plan
Species Survival Plan: each one issues breeding and transfer recommendations for the animals it covers, which is why a zoo's tiger may be sent across the country to meet a chosen mate.
Q 06Which extinct, half-striped relative of the zebra was photographed alive at London Zoo in the 1860s?
Quagga
Quagga: a mare at London Zoo was photographed between 1863 and 1870, hunters finished off the wild herds within a decade, and the last captive animal died in Amsterdam in 1883.
Q 07'Zoo' is short for what?
Zoological garden
Zoological garden: the clipped form began as a nickname for London's Zoological Gardens and caught on when music-hall star Alfred Vance sang 'Walking in the Zoo'.
Q 08Which zoo, billed as America's first, was chartered in 1859 but did not open until 1874?
Philadelphia Zoo
Philadelphia Zoo won its charter in 1859, but the Civil War stalled it for fifteen years, so other American cities were showing zoo animals before its gates opened.
Q 09Which equine, once extinct outside captivity, has been returned to Mongolia's Hustai National Park since the 1990s?
Przewalski's horse
Przewalski's horse vanished from the wild, and every one alive today descends from about a dozen wild-caught animals bred in zoos, the stock that later let herds go home to Mongolia.
Q 10What term do zookeepers use for stimulating an animal's brain through its physical and social surroundings?
Environmental enrichment
Environmental enrichment: keepers hide, bury or scatter food, fit puzzle feeders and bring in new scents so that animals have to search and forage much as they would in the wild.
Q 11The oldest known zoo, some 5,500 years old and dug up at Hierakonpolis, was in which country?
Egypt
Egypt: the animals were buried in the rulers' cemetery at Hierakonpolis, and broken bones that had healed show that people had kept them alive in captivity.
Q 12Ancient writers say 9,000 animals died in the hundred days of games that opened which Roman arena under Titus?
Colosseum
Colosseum: Cassius Dio puts the slaughter at nine thousand beasts and says women joined the hunters, while Suetonius has five thousand animals of every kind shown in a single day.
Q 13Carl Hagenbeck's Tierpark, which pioneered open, bar-free animal panoramas in 1907, stands in which German port city?
Hamburg
Q 21Knut, the polar bear cub who caused 'Knutmania' in 2007, was born at which zoo?
Berlin Zoo
Berlin Zoo: Knut was born there in December 2006, abandoned on a rock by his mother Tosca and raised by a keeper, the first polar bear cub to survive infancy at the zoo in over thirty years.
Q 22Knut, the hand-reared polar bear cub of 2007, shared the cover of which magazine's 'Green Issue' with Leonardo DiCaprio?
Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair: Annie Leibovitz photographed the cub, who was then set beside the actor in her cover picture, and his zoo trademarked his name and took in nearly five million extra euros that year.
Q 23Which Texas-born gorilla, shot in 2016 after a small boy fell into his zoo moat, became a worldwide internet meme?
Harambe
Hamburg: Hagenbeck, an animal dealer, built his park at Stellingen on the city's edge and showed polar bears and big cats in open landscapes, a layout that zoos around the world went on to copy.
Q 14In 1993 the body running New York's zoos changed its name to what?
The Wildlife Conservation Society
The Wildlife Conservation Society began in 1895 as the New York Zoological Society, set up largely by members of the Boone and Crockett Club to open a free zoo and preserve wildlife.
Q 15In 1853 London Zoo opened the world's first public what, stocked by the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse?
Aquarium
Aquarium: Gosse coined the word itself for the zoo's new Fish House, and his book on keeping sea creatures at home, out the next year, set off a Victorian craze for parlour tanks.
Q 16Which Bedfordshire zoo did London's Zoological Society open in 1931 on a derelict farm, to give its larger animals open paddocks?
Whipsnade
Whipsnade proved its worth within a decade: when bombs threatened Regent's Park in the Second World War, the society sent its most valuable animals out to the country zoo for safety.
Q 17The San Diego Zoo grew out of animal exhibits abandoned after which event?
The 1915 Panama–California Exposition
The 1915 Panama–California Exposition left caged animals in Balboa Park; as surgeon Harry Wegeforth told it, hearing its lions roar made him say San Diego should have a zoo, and he founded one.
Q 18Which bookkeeper, hired in 1925, rose to run San Diego Zoo until 1953 and became known as 'the Zoo Lady'?
Belle Benchley
Belle Benchley got the top job in 1927 because a string of directors had not lasted, among them animal collector Frank Buck, who fell out with the founder and was gone in three months.
Q 19Ken Allen, San Diego Zoo's 'Hairy Houdini', who kept escaping his enclosure in 1985, was what kind of ape?
Orangutan
Orangutan: Ken Allen walked out three times that summer to stroll past the other animals, and keepers who posed as tourists to learn his route got nowhere, because he would not be fooled.
Q 20Which New York dynasty gave its name to the Bronx Zoo fountain that once stood in a lakeside piazza in Como, Italy?
The Rockefellers
The Rockefellers: William Rockefeller bought the fountain from Como in 1902 for 3,500 lire, then about $637, and had it shipped across the Atlantic and set up at the zoo the next year.
Harambe was born at Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville and named after a Rita Marley song; keepers shot him to protect the three-year-old, and mock tributes to him flooded the internet for months.
Q 24The Zookeeper's Wife tells how a zoo director and his wife hid Jews from the Nazis at which city's zoo?
Warsaw
Warsaw: bombing had wrecked much of the zoo, so Jan and Antonina Żabiński hid people fleeing the ghetto in the empty cages and in their own villa, and the zoo now carries their names.
Q 25By 1987 every wild member of which giant bird had been caught for a last-ditch zoo breeding programme?
California condor
California condor: only 22 were left in 1982, so every wild bird was taken in to breed at zoos in San Diego and Los Angeles, and their descendants now fly free again over three states.
Q 26'Me at the zoo', filmed at San Diego Zoo's elephant enclosure in 2005, was the first video uploaded to which website?
YouTube
YouTube: co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded the 19-second clip in April 2005, and all he has to say in it is that the cool thing about elephants is their really long trunks.
Q 27Jumbo the elephant was sold in 1882 to which American showman despite public protest?
P. T. Barnum
P. T. Barnum paid London Zoo £2,000 for Jumbo while schoolchildren wrote to Queen Victoria begging her to stop the sale, and the elephant's fame made 'jumbo' an everyday word for huge.
Q 28At which Paris zoo was the young elephant Jumbo kept before he was moved to London in 1865?
Jardin des Plantes
Jardin des Plantes: its menagerie sent Jumbo on to London, where he grew into the giant whose sale to an American circus caused a national outcry; a train killed him in Ontario in 1885.
Q 29Which New York zoo, begun in the 1860s as a park menagerie, is home to Alex the lion in the film Madagascar?
Central Park Zoo
Central Park Zoo began by accident: New Yorkers kept leaving unwanted pets in the park, starting with a bear cub tied to a tree in 1859, until the city gave the collection a proper home.
Q 30Sudan, who spent 34 years at a Czech zoo and died in Kenya in 2018, was the last male of which animal?
Northern white rhino
Northern white rhino: Sudan came from Dvůr Králové, the only zoo where his kind ever bred, and when he died the whole subspecies was down to two females.