NEW! Revised Feb 2025

Some terminology clarification:

• Herd (or flock) diet: a diet for one or more similar animals. All of these animals are listed on the same diet with the same diet number.
  • For example, for a flock of 50 flamingos, you could create one diet that consists of 100 g of flamingo food and assign 50 birds to that diet for a total of 5000 g.
  • By default, each animal is considered to have a value of 1. In the Animals + Enclosures tab, you can set the Animal Units of a listed animal to be something other than 1. For example, you might set it to be less (a smaller animal) or more (a growing/pregnant/lactating animal) than 1.
  • Visual example: 🦆🦆🦆🦆 <- a herd diet. A single diet number (with one or more animals listed) is a herd or flock diet.
    
• Grouped diets: multiple diets (not animals) combined together. Think of a Diet Group as a folder containing multiple diets.

There are two main reasons to add multiple diets to a Grouped Diet:

1. Summed Diets: You want to combine several diets together. Typically this is because you have multiple animals on different diets living together in an exhibit. Examples would be an aviary (many different species of birds), a family group of gorillas (each individual has its own diet, but they get fed as a family), or an aquarium that gets “broadcast” fed with a diet for the entire tank intended to be eaten by many different species.
   • For example, in an aviary, you might have ducks (who eat duck food), parrots (who eat parrot food), and chickens (who eat chicken food). These birds are all fed together out of the same pans. You can place these three diets together in a Group.
   • The summed diet (duck + parrot + chicken food) will be prepared as a single diet, but you can still maintain the three types of diets separately, which makes it easier when birds move around or you want to see the diet history.
   • Visual example: (Diet #32🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆) + (Diet#28🦜🦜) + (Diet#72🐓🐓🐓) = Grouped diet #9004
     
     OR
     
2. Assembly Diets: You have a set of diets with similar ingredients and you want to prepare them “assembly line” style, preparing one ingredient at a time across multiple diets. This is common for aquarium diets where you might pull capelin out and put them into everyone’s diet, then pull herring out and put them in everyone’s diet. Or, if you have many small animals and you add carrots to all of their diets, then lettuce, then pellets. In this case, you are still preparing individual diets (not summed), but you are preparing many similar diets as a group in “assembly” style at the same time.

Best practices:

In general, you can set up most diets as either herd/flock or grouped diets and it will work well either way. For example, you could put 5 gorillas on a single diet (herd) or put 5 individual gorilla diets into a gorilla group (grouped diet). Both will work fine. It is best practice to set up diets to reflect the ways they are both managed and fed. If the animals are fed as a group, the diet should be prepared as a group. If the animals are fed individually, diets should be set up (and also weighed and prepared) individually. And sometimes you want to manage animals as individuals, but feed them as a group. ZDN can do all of these things.

The goal of this advice is to avoid situations where the Nutrition Center carefully weighs out and prepares multiple individual diets only to have the keepers put everything together in a pan, or for the Nutrition Center to carefully weigh out and prepare food in bulk for an area and then the keepers have to weigh the food out a second time as they are portioning it out to individuals. It is most efficient to handle/weigh/prepare the food once rather than multiple times.

When making the decision about whether to set up your animals as individuals, herds, or groups, you might consider what the most common diet requests are for the group. If the most common diet request is “Please increase the entire group 10%”, then you probably want to treat the group as a herd and put them all on one diet. This will be the easiest way to quickly do increases or decreases across the entire group at once. If the most common diet request is “Please add apples to Fluffy’s diet and decrease Fifi’s diet by 5%”, then that tells you that you probably want to set up your animals as individuals with separate diets.

If the keepers feed Fluffy separately from Fifi, then you might not group their diets at all.

If the keepers feed Fluffy’s and Fifi’s diet together, then you probably want to add those to a Grouped Diet in “By Diet (Summed)” mode” so that they are prepared together.

But, if you want to use “Assembly” style prep for these animals (e.g. Prep Fluffy’s lettuce, then prep Fifi’s lettuce, then Prep Fluffy’s apples, followed by Fifi’s apples), you might still consider putting them into a Diet Group and choose the Assembly/Ingredient Prep option.

Summed Diets

Examples

Here are some examples of how to apply Herds and Groups in practice:

• A group of 4 similar zebra fed together – Create 1 diet with the amounts for 1 animal. Add all 4 animals to the diet (on the Edit Diets > Animals + Enclosures tab). The group amount will change to reflect 4x the single diet. Visual example: (Diet#35🦓🦓🦓🦓)
• A group of 4 similar zebra fed together. One zebra gets an additional “treat” for taking medication:
  • Option 1 (Good): Create 1 diet with the amounts for 1 animal. Add all 4 animals to the diet (for the diet they have in common). Create a second diet with just the additional treat and assign only the medicated animal to that diet (will generate 2 separate diets for that group). Visual example: (Diet#35🦓🦓🦓🦓) + (Diet#92🍎)
  • Option 2 (Better): Create 1 diet with the amounts for 1 animal. Add only the 3 non-medicated animals to that diet. Copy the diet items. Create a new diet for the medicated zebra. Paste in the diet items from the first diet. Add in the medication treat. This will also generate 2 separate diets for the zebras, but they will be more “readable” by others. Visual example: (Diet#35🦓🦓🦓) + (Diet#92🦓🍎)
  • Option 3 (Best): Begin the same as for either option 1 or 2, but create a Group called “Zebra Herd” and assign both diets to that group. This will generate one combined prep for the zebra group containing all the foods from the two diets. Visual example: Group#9007 = (Diet#35🦓🦓🦓) + (Diet#92🦓🍎)
• A group of 4 adult zebras, plus a newborn foal – Create 1 diet with the amounts for 1 animal. Add all 5 animals to the diet. Set mom’s Animal Units to 1.4 to account for early lactation. Set foal to 0 Animal Units for now. In a few weeks, set foal to 0.5 Animal Units and perhaps increase mom to 1.8 Animal Units. Visual example: (Diet#35🦓🦓 🦓🦓🦓)
• A group of 4 gorillas fed together as a family – one 3-year-old, one adult lactating female (mom), one adult female, one silverback male.
  • Option 1 (Best): Create 4 separate diets (one for each animal). Create a group called “Gorilla Family” and assign each of the four diets to belong to this group. This will allow you to maintain separate diet histories and individualized diet plans for each animal, yet prepare only one set of food that will be fed as a group to the family. Visual example: Group#9009 = (Diet#342🦍) + (Diet#97🦍) +(Diet#98 🦍) + (Diet#99 🦍)
  • Option 2 (Also Best): Create 1 gorilla diet. Assign all four animals to this diet. Assign Animal Units as 0.5 (baby), 1.2 (mom – late lactation), 1 (adult female), 1.5 (silverback). Doing this may make future diet changes easier – you only have to change one diet rather than 4. However, it is harder to tailor diets to each individual. Visual example: (Diet#97🦍🦍🦍🦍)
  • There is no right answer – either option will work depending on whether you are more likely to make 4 separate diet changes when the group as a whole needs a change, or have to do convoluted work when you want to add diet items specific to each individual.
• A group of 4 gorillas fed together as a family – with enrichment items
  • Option 1: Create 5 diets – one for each animal, a fifth for the shared enrichment items (can put all 5 diets together in a Group if desired)
  • Option 2: Create 4 diets – one for each animal, a portion of the enrichment goes on each diet (can put all 4 diets together in a Group if desired)
  • Option 3: If enrichment items are only intended for specific animals and not the group as a whole: Create 4 diets – one for each animal. Add each animal’s enrichment/med/training items to their own diets. Put the diets in a Group as above. Set the Bin for these enrichment items to be different across the 4 animals. For example, you might put the enrichment items for Mom Gorilla in Bin 50, for Adult Female Gorilla in Bin 51, for Silverback in Bin 52, and Baby in Bin 53. Set the “description” for each of these bins to the animal’s name/number to uniquely target foods to those specific containers. But, you might still put all the greens in the same bin across the 4 diets so that those continue to get prepped together.
• Once you have a group in mind, you will need to decide whether you want to prepare that group using By Diet (summed ingredients) or By Ingredient (Assembly Line) styles.

How to add diets to Diet Groups (Grouped Diets)

1. Create a group (Settings > Edit Zoo Locations > Diet Groups OR Edit Diets > Double-click on “Diet Group” drop-down menu)
   • Groups should have large numbers (>9000). Group numbers should NEVER overlap with diet numbers.
   • Give the group a meaningful name
   • Choose whether you want (in the Touchscreen, by default) to prepare the group as a sum of the individuals in the group (By Diet (Summed) or as individual diets in order of ingredients (By Ingredient (Assembly Line)) style
   • Select a species (for mixed species groups, you can select “Mixed Species”)
2. Navigate to each diet that you want to add to the group and choose your group from the “Diet Group” drop-down menu.
   

The background will turn purple to indicate that you are now looking at a member of a Group (in this example, group #9008, the Rhinoceros Group)

The diet you are on will now be listed in the members box in the Group Area (in this example, along with Meriam, another rhinoceros)

You can jump quickly to another group member by double-clicking their name/line in the list.

You will now have many more reporting choices in the reporting menu. In addition to printing the diet you are currently on (Diet #2 in this example), you can also print diets for the group (each diet individually or the sum of all the diets in the group), the group diets as a grid, or the group diets in Assembly format (i.e. organized by ingredient then animal, rather than by animal then ingredient).