Aging animals challenge zoos

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Even as a youngster, Rollie looked older and wiser than his years. His white mustache sprouted longer by the month, until it flamed from his cheeks like a German kaiser's. Sometimes, it all but hid his mouth.

In the last few years, though, the tribulations of age - not just the appearance of it - have begun catching up with Rollie. It wasn't immediately noticeable on the outside. But his keepers are reminded each time they get a look past the Emperor Tamarin's flowing whiskers, and into his jaws.

The tiny monkey, used to crunching away on raw sweet potato and celery, has surrendered all but 6 of his 32 teeth to the toll of time.

At 17, Rollie - a resident of Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo - is a senior citizen of his species. In the wilds of the Amazon, his keepers say, he almost certainly would never have made it this long.

In captivity, he's got plenty of company.

The Golden Years have arrived at the nation's zoos and aquariums, and that is taking veterinarians and keepers, along with their animals, into a zone of unknowns.

Do female gorillas, now frequently living in to their 40s and 50s, experience menopause?

Can an aging lemur suffer from dementia?

How do you weigh the most difficult choice - between prolonging pain and ending life - when the patient is a venerable jaguar who's been around so long she's come to feel like a member of the family?

All of those questions hang on a larger one that, until recent years, has been left to educated guesswork based on limited evidence.

''How old is geriatric? How old do animals really live?'' says Sharon Dewar, a spokeswoman for the Lincoln Park Zoo, whose keepers have adjusted to Rollie's toothlessness by serving him a diet of soft-cooked veggies. ''That's the million-dollar question.''

Zeroing in on the answer takes years of tracking births, deaths and the age of animal populations. But zoos, which have pooled information on animal births and genealogy since the 1970s, are drawing some early conclusions. For example, records show that the median age of Siberian tigers living in zoos in the two decades ending in 1990 was a little over 11 years old. Since then, however, the median age of those tigers has topped 15 years old.

The increase in animal longevity is no mystery. Just as with people, health care for animals has become much more sophisticated.

At the San Antonio Zoo, keepers noticed that George, a 37-year-old tapir, was slowing down. In the mornings, his legs seemed stiffer, and he had trouble getting up. The diagnosis was clear: arthritis.

At first they put him on dietary supplements. They moved on to Adequan, a prescription that helped ease the discomfort further. Still, wasn't there more they could do? The problem is there's no textbook for how to treat a geriatric tapir.

Reasoning that tapirs are not so different from horses, the zoo called in a specialist who performed acupuncture on George, inserting tiny needles at various medians in an effort to ease the pain.

Since then, George ''acts like he's five years younger,'' says Rob Coke, the zoo's senior staff veterinarian.

Even as San Antonio and other zoos have improved on health care, they've also become much more careful and cooperative in managing animal populations, tracking their animals to make decisions about breeding. Keepers focus on more than just keeping animals healthy, creating habitats and social environments that will make them happy and less-stressed.

The result is more robust animals, with the potential to live longer. That potential is realized because life in a zoo or aquarium grants animals an exception to nature's laws of survival. In the wild, weaker animals fall victim to predators, parasites and poachers before they ever have a chance to grow too old.

''Life as a wild animal is tough,'' says Steve Feldman of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Without predators, and treated for disease, animals are far outliving their wild counterparts.

At the Minnesota Zoo, a pair of bottlenose dolphins have reached 44 and 42 years old, and in Florida a couple have reached their 50s.

''We know from studying the teeth of animals (dolphins) that have washed up on beaches, in studies I've looked at, that there are no animals that old,'' says Kevin Willis, an expert on animal life expectancy at the Minneapolis zoo, in the Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley.

But old age subjects animals to wear and tear and changes in physiology that they would never have known otherwise.

On a recent afternoon at the New York Aquarium, the uncertainties of animal aging are evident in the case of a California sea lion named Fonzie.

For years, he was one of the top performers for the crowds in the stands of the aquarium's amphitheater. But at 21, he's definitely slowing down. He started hobbling. The corneas on his eyes turned cloudy. He lost interest in his trainers. His weight dropped to 552 pounds. Under the X-ray, veterinarians noticed subtle changes in his bone structure.

''You know how it is when you have arthritis and in the winter time your bones creek because it's so damp and cold?'' says Kate McClave, who runs the aquarium's onsite hospital. ''Well, it's a similar thing for a marine mammal.''

To help, vets moved Fonzie to an indoor pool where the water temperature is a closely controlled 55 degrees and he is protected from winter winds, and put him on anti-inflammatories. Nearly three months later, the eggplant-shaped mammal lumbers in to the checkup room with all the grace of a sandbag, his breath fragrant with fish. In exchange for a finned snack, he submits himself to the probe of a stethoscope, a few eye drops, an ultrasound and a look inside his mouth.

''This is one of our few patients that will actually say 'ahhhh','' says Paul Calle, senior veterinarian for the Wildlife Conversation Society, which runs the aquarium.

Careful treatment appears to have eased Fonzie's discomfort and he's ready to rejoin the other sea lions. But his days as a performer are probably over. At the aquarium, his seniority is far from unusual. Immediately after his exam, keepers moved on to take a blood sample from Spook, a 43-year-old gray seal believed to be the oldest on record. Earlier in the week, the aquarium lost a sand tiger shark named Bertha who, at 65, also held an age record.

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