A trip to the Fort Worth Zoo is no doubt fun and entertaining. From the majestic African tiger to the impressive Asian elephants, the animals at the zoo tend to steal the spotlight, and rightfully so. But it’s the people behind the scenes, who tend to get a little less recognition than the wildlife, that help make the Fort Worth Zoo among the best in the nation. Depending on the season, it takes anywhere from 200 to 500 employees to operate the zoo. Here’s a look at just nine of those people and the vital work they do in the park and beyond.
Crystal Wise
Peter Briggs | Elephant Supervisor
For Peter Briggs, working with animals is in his blood. Growing up, he worked with cattle and horses along with the rest of his family. And although his current job as elephant supervisor is much different, his background helped prepare him for the role.
“My great-grandmother was the founder of the American Quarter Horse Association,” he says. “So as far as our family goes, my brother’s a horse trainer, and all of my sisters have shown [horses]. We’ve always been involved with animals.”
Briggs joined the Fort Worth Zoo in 2003. He attended a job fair that helped him get his foot in the door with the merchandise department. Peter worked his way up the ladder, moving from Texas Wild! to the children’s petting zoo area until he was eventually approached to join the elephant department.
“I had zero experience with them — I knew they were big,” he jokes.
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But he quickly learned the ropes, citing his background with horses and cattle as helpful, and after about five years of working in the department, Peter was promoted to elephant supervisor. During his time there, he’s seen all the work that went into creating the new habitat, Elephant Springs.
“In an industry, when you’re working with animals, you have to evolve,” he says of the new facility. “You have to adapt to the changing environments and needs of the animals. For keepers, that’s what comes first — making the lives of the animals we care for the best that it can be.”
As elephant supervisor, Briggs and his team oversee the care of the zoo’s seven Asian elephants (ages 7 to 49) and the greater one-horned rhino. Though he doesn’t see his job as particularly dangerous, cleaning, feeding, and training the up to 10,000-pound animals can be challenging.
“As you work with animals for longer and longer periods of time, you understand behaviors, you understand what to look for, how to progress around them,” he says. “That’s safe not only for the animal but for yourself and anybody else working around them.”
The new Elephant Springs facility is not only an upgrade to the elephants’ habitat, but Briggs says it allows guests an up-close look at the popular animals.
“The really cool part about Elephant Springs is we added a demonstration area,” he says. “It’s a covered seating area for the public to sit in and includes a smaller yard that we can bring the elephants into. We can give them a bath or just do a training session. We’re experimenting with it every day. That gives us a chance to show the public some of the stuff behind the scenes.”
Allowing the public to see and learn about the elephants and rhino close-up is key in bringing awareness to conservation issues for these animals.
“These elephants aren’t just in zoos and sanctuaries,” Briggs says. “They’re in the wild. That’s where they’re most threatened. So that part of our day is really cool because we can use the opportunity to educate people. They may never come across that information unless they heard it from someone like this.”
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Stesha Pasachnik | Conservation Biologist
Understanding the impact Fort Worth Zoo has on global conservation starts by understanding the work of its conservation biologists like Dr. Stesha Pasachnik, who focuses on protecting and conserving critically endangered iguanas in the Caribbean and Central America.
“People don’t often realize what goes on behind the scenes at the zoo,” Pasachnik says. “Zoos in the U.S. have contributed hugely to the conservation of many, many threatened and endangered species. They’ve really been integral in iguana conservation.”
Though Pasachnik, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee where she studied conservation genetics, offices at the Fort Worth Zoo, she typically spends half of her time doing research and conservation abroad.
Pasachnik and the Fort Worth Zoo work closely with the Hope Zoo in Kingston, Jamaica, and its head start program for the island’s native Jamaican iguana, thought to be extinct in the 1940s. The Hope Zoo takes in young iguanas and allows them to grow until they’re large enough to defend themselves in the wild. They currently have more than 350 iguanas in captivity.
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Her fieldwork in the Caribbean is in a much more primitive environment than the zoo. Jamaican iguanas naturally live in a remote area of the island called the Hillshire Hills. To reach their native habitat, she has to travel by van, then by boat, and then hike into the tropical forest to reach base camp.
“There’s no electricity, no running water,” she says. “You live in a tent, on a concrete pad, and no bathroom, of course. We just have a very rustic kitchen. We hike in gas canisters so we can cook.”
During her month-long stay at camp, Pasachnik does various things like releasing iguanas, researching predators like mongooses and cats, observing nesting sites, and selecting hatchlings to go back into the program to start the whole process over again.
Pasachnik also works on the island of Roatán, Honduras, focusing on the Roatán spiny-tailed iguana.
“We do conservation workshops where we bring students and managers from developing areas together to teach them about iguanas and the importance of iguanas in the ecosystem,” she says. “And we teach basic research and data collection methods.”
The importance of Pasachnik’s conservation work goes beyond just preserving species of endangered iguanas. As the largest native herbivores on these islands, the tropical dry forest ecosystems depend on these animals to survive.
“They’re really the maintainers,” she says of the iguanas’ role in their habitat. “We often call them the farmers or the guardians of the forest.”
Back home, Pasachnik stays busy publishing research, working with graduate students, developing research plans, working with different conservation foundations, and writing grants. In her free time, she enjoys gardening — filling her yard with native plants and milkweed for monarch butterflies to enjoy. She says it’s an excellent way for anyone to contribute to conservation in their backyard.
“Every little thing that you can do does matter,” she says. “Even on your own property, even just making a small flower bed that has some native plants instead of just exotic plants in it. Every person’s actions can matter, and you can have an impact just by doing little things.”
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Jessi Gorman | Outreach Specialist
As an outreach specialist, Jessi Gorman is part animal trainer, part entertainer, and part educator. On any given day, you can find Gorman doing a variety of work at the Fort Worth Zoo — from morning husbandry (feeding, watering, and cleaning animals) to teaching a classroom full of eager learners about penguins, then maybe rounding off her afternoon training a baby goose to fly.
Gorman joined the outreach team a little over five years ago. Growing up, Gorman always knew she wanted to work with animals in some capacity.
“I was the kid that was catching lizards or frogs in my front yard and making little habitats for them in buckets,” she says as she reminisces about her childhood interests.
So, Gorman earned a degree in zoo animal technology from Santa Fe College and started working as a veterinary technician. She also enjoyed taking communication classes and noticed she was a natural public speaker and entertainer who loved theater. It was a job with the Ringling Bros. Circus that introduced Gorman to outreach work that combined her passions.
“When I realized that was a thing you could do, I was like, ‘Oh, that is for me,’” she says.
The outreach team at Fort Worth Zoo is a large department with many different facets. They offer preschool and summer school classes to young, budding animal lovers, walk around the park giving keeper chats in front of exhibits, go off-site to visit schools and other organizations around town, and put on stage shows where guests of the zoo can see animals up close.
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Gorman says her favorite part of her job is changing people’s perceptions about certain animals with bad reputations.
“Things like snakes, bugs, armadillos, opossums, skunks — people have really negative feelings about,” she says. “But once they meet them in person and see how cool they are up close and learn about how important they are in our environment, we change a lot of minds. That reaction is why I do what I do. I love to see people open up their hearts to animals.”
Training makes up a large portion of Gorman’s work, too. Since wild animals aren’t naturally used to things like audiences, music, lights, or children, the outreach team spends a lot of time identifying animals that would do well in the program and getting them accustomed to performing.
We have a hyacinth macaw named Alta, and Alta is a wonderful outreach bird,” Gorman says. “She travels great. She loves to see people. She’s very calm on my hand. But that doesn’t mean that all hyacinth macaws are going to be right for that job. It takes a certain animal to enjoy this job. And if they don’t enjoy it, it’s not going to work out.”
When she’s not working, Gorman enjoys volunteering at the Humane Society of North Texas’ equine and livestock ranch and spending time with her husband, Tripp, a Fort Worth Zoo elephant keeper, and their 4-year-old son. Her love of animals and dedication to education are relevant to her professional and personal life.
She hopes to inspire that same spirit in guests.
“If people don’t see animals or have a one-on-one experience with them, it’s really hard for them to care about animals in the wild,” she says on the importance of her work.
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John Griffieon | Associate Veterinarian
It’s probably not surprising that the zoo’s 7,000 animal collection requires a few veterinarians on staff to help keep them all healthy. Dr. John Griffieon is a new addition to the team, who joined last October. What may be less than obvious is that the zoo’s veterinarians don’t work with a specialized group of species. From elephants to starfish, they’re all Griffieon’s patients. He says learning new ways to treat a variety of different species is why he loves his work.
“People that pursue zoological medicine find enjoyment in the challenges of not knowing everything about every species,” Griffieon says. “A lot of it is comparative. What do we know about a similar species? What has been done? What can we compare it to? It’s challenging but fun.”
As a North Carolina State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine student, Griffieon found himself passionate about turtles and tortoises. (Side note: Did you know all tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises?) But since entering the zoo world, his areas of interest have evolved.
“We get into this career because we have a hard time choosing,” he says of zoological medicine.
Griffieon can be found doing preventative exams, running imaging and diagnostics tests, visiting larger animals in their habitat (it’s hard to fit the elephants through the zoo’s hospital doors), documenting medical records, studying and contributing to research, or training interns. No one day is the same as the next.
The team is continually working to find new advancements to treat the 540 different species at the zoo. Providing medical care to a very large animal like the greater one-horned rhino can prove just as challenging as tiny ones like a Pecos pupfish. Sometimes, special instruments and processes have to be created.
“That’s the fun part,” he says. “We get to be creative and work on designing things that work specifically for them.”
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The staff also works to involve animals in their medical care through behavior training. Teaching an animal to cooperate in things like vaccines and testing makes the work easier for everyone.
“It’s less stressful for them during the procedure,” he says. “It’s less stressful for us. The drugs work better. Anesthesia is typically smoother. There are a lot of benefits.”
Griffieon says a lesser-known but large aspect of his work is public health. Keeping the animals healthy prevents illness in them and illness in people like staff and guests. While this has always been an essential part of his work, he says COVID-19 shined a new light on the issue.
“The public is learning that diseases go back and forth between animals and people,” he says. “Seventy-five percent of new diseases in people come from animals. So, the more that we learn about animal disease, the more information that we’re going to have to take on future pandemics.”
Though life as a zoo veterinarian means long, hard hours, Griffieon tries to spend his time away from work relaxing. New to Texas, he enjoys exploring nature with his fiancé and fellow exotic animal vet, Scott. Together, they have a little zoo of their own at home with a dog, two ferrets, two tortoises, and a lizard.
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Robyn Doege | Supervisor of Aquatic Ectotherms and Dive Safety Officer
Robyn Doege started her journey as a professional aquarist first as a hobbyist. She started her first fish tank at 7 years old and was keeping coral by the time she was 11. So in college, when approached with a job offer as a coral propagator, she jumped at the chance to turn what she enjoyed doing in her free time into a lifelong career.
As the zoo’s supervisor of aquatic ectotherms (commonly known as “cold-blooded” animals) and dive safety officer, Doege heads a team that manages the zoo’s aquatic animals and maintains their habitats — a job that requires a special scuba diving certification. Keeping the park’s six aquatic areas clean and their inhabitants healthy requires a very specialized skill set.
“You’re part biologist, part electrician, part plumber, part statistician,” she says.
When she’s not testing water samples, taking care of quarantined animals, coordinating maintenance dives, or training fish, Doege spends much of her time at the zoo working on conservation efforts for threatened aquatic species like Texas mussels, Pecos pupfish, seahorses, tiger stingray, and horned lizards (not technically an aquatic animal but still an area of interest for her). She says freshwater fish are the underdogs of the conservation world.
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“A lot of people like marine fish because they’re pretty or colorful,” she says. “And people love sharks because sharks are cool and dangerous, but of all the native freshwater species, they could use a lot more funding and help.”
Doege also partners with the zoo on the Florida Reef Tract Rescue Project to save one of the largest barrier reefs in the continental U.S. Since 2014, an unknown disease has nearly destroyed the Florida Reef Tract’s coral species. (Coral are commonly mistaken for plants but are actually living animals.) To help, Fort Worth Zoo took in over 30 species of corals to keep healthy until it’s safe for them to return to Florida. Robyn is working on a husbandry guide to teach other zoos how to care for these corals.
“The corals affected — for even someone that has never been to Florida and went snorkeling would be like, ‘Something’s wrong,’” she says. “It’s just that big of a shock.”
At home, Doege has what her staff lovingly refers to as “Robyn’s Petting Zoo.” She has pet chickens, rabbits, a couple of parrots, and a 100-pound tortoise named Tortie.
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John Drummond | Supervisor of Life Support Systems
When John Drummond first applied to work at the Fort Worth Zoo five years ago, he hoped to be a gorilla keeper. He studied biology in school and always wanted to work at a zoo, but he was also a licensed master plumber. His unique background made the zoo’s head engineer reach out to John about a life support systems role.
“They thought I would be a good fit,” he says. “I told them, ‘I don’t know; I promised myself I wouldn’t take a plumbing job. I don’t want to be a plumber. I want to be a zookeeper.’ But he said it could be a foot in the door for me.”
It turns out Drummond loved being a life support systems engineer. The work is nothing like the residential plumbing he was accustomed to. He takes care of a wide variety of life support systems many aquatic animals at the zoo need to survive. If you’ve ever admired the hippos through crystal-clear water, you can thank Drummond’s hard work.
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“I don’t even want to be a keeper anymore because I like the challenge of my job,” he says. “I like solving problems. I like fixing things. I like having to troubleshoot things and figure out what’s wrong. And it’s always something different every day.”
He now supervises a team of two other LSS engineers. Together they make morning rounds throughout the park starting at 7 a.m. before guests arrive. The team checks all the water feature’s filtration systems, temperature control equipment, ozone levels, along with a variety of other maintenance requests. Drummond enjoys seeing all the different animals that live in the habitats he visits.
“This morning, I was unclogging a drain full of black bear hair, and the black bear was sitting there on the other side of the door, watching me work,” he says. “That was pretty cute.”
Lots of emergencies tend to pop up in John’s line of work, and he has to respond quickly to them or the animals’ lives could be at risk. During February’s historic winter storm, when people were stuck at home without power, Drummond was at the zoo daily doing emergency maintenance like defrosting boilers in the hippo pool to keep the habitat safe.
“There’re thousands of fish in that pool, and fish are really temperature-sensitive,” he says. “So, if the boiler didn’t come on, they probably would have died.”
Drummond is a self-proclaimed “giant nerd” who likes video games and craft beer. So much so that he reached out to Martin House Brewing Company to collaborate on special zoo-themed beers benefiting conservation organizations, combining his love of animals and beer.
“One was called Elephant Springs in conjunction with our new exhibit,” he says. “Twenty-five percent of that is going to a conservation fund. And they also made a special beer called Turtle Power, and 25% of those sales go to the Turtle Survival Alliance.
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Amy Coslik | Animal Program Coordinator
Aside from actually handling animals, there’s not much at the zoo that Amy Coslik doesn’t do. Her job title of animal projects coordinator is purposely broad to encompass all the areas of her work.
Coslik first came to the zoo in 1999 to work as a technician in the nutrition quality control laboratory after completing her master’s in animal science at the University of Maryland College Park. Coslik had experience working in the nutrition lab at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., so when the Fort Worth Zoo wanted to start its own lab, she was perfect for running it.
The nutrition lab, one of only three in the country, is responsible for testing all of the bulk food items (grains, seeds, pellets) that the animals eat, ensuring their nutrients — namely vitamin A and vitamin E — are at proper levels. Think of a nutrition label on a cereal box; Coslik determines that information for all of the zoo animals’ food. When the zoo’s animals get the exact nutrients necessary in their feed, it prevents health issues later.
“If there’s anything we can do that’s preventative, that’s great,” she says. “So, if there is a feed that’s high in magnesium that happened accidentally at the plant, we can figure that out before the animal actually takes in that feed, before it gets too much of it.”
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She took some time off to raise her family and then came back as animal program coordinator. She still spends half her time in the lab, but she also supports the zoo’s animal programs and conservation director. So, when she’s not working in a dark room extracting nutrients from animal feed (many vitamins are light-sensitive), she’s working on pollinator conservation, helping set up outdoor learning areas at local schools, planting native plant gardens in and around the zoo, coordinating activities for the zoo’s summer camp students, and helping out in many other areas of the park.
“My job kind of became this very diverse job,” she says. “I really like that because I like being introduced to new projects, and I really love working in the lab as well.”
As part of her role in pollinator conservation, Coslik works with organizations like the National Wildlife Federation’s Mayors for Monarchs program to support native pollinator habitats and monarch migration, whose population has declined by nearly 90% over the last two decades, she says. By planting native host plants, establishing “no-mow” areas, and removing invasive plants in and around the zoo, Coslik and her colleagues aid the monarchs in their migration and provide a healthy habitat for other pollinator species.
She says people can get involved in pollinator conservation in their own backyards. Although perfectly manicured lawns are the social norm, starting a garden with native plants and letting weeds like milkweed (the only plant where monarchs lay eggs) will help these threatened species.
“I’m grateful to work in conservation and feel like I’m doing something for the greater good,” she says.
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Adam Reppert | Staff Nutritionist
While many zoos leave the nutritional care of their animal collection up to keepers or curators, Fort Worth Zoo has a dedicated team of zoological dieticians, like staff nutritionist Adam Reppert, ensuring the nutritional wellness of all the animals at the park.
After earning his graduate degree in nutritional science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Reppert worked as a registered dietician (for humans) in a hospital, but he said something in his career was missing. Reppert always played around with the idea of working with exotic animals but knew he didn’t want to be a keeper. He completed an internship at Fossil Rim, working with black rhinoceros during school, and through a connection he made there, he joined the Fort Worth Zoo’s nutrition team.
“She directed me to some internships so I could get more experience, and lo and behold, the Fort Worth Zoo was hosting a residency program in zoo nutrition,” he says. “So, I applied for that and got that position. I didn’t always know I wanted to do zoo nutrition, but I was able to merge my career path with my childhood love of animals.”
A large part of Reppert’s work is responding to diet change requests for all of the zoo’s animals (birds, fish, amphibians, mammals, everything). Sometimes an animal needs to gain or lose weight, or they’re avoiding certain foods, or they’re getting aggressive with other animals during feeding times. It’s Reppert’s job to address the problem and see what can be done to the animal’s diet to correct it.
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But knowing the best diet to feed over 540 species at the zoo is entirely different from adjusting a human’s diet or even knowing what to feed a cat or dog.
“We’ll say, ‘This exotic animal is closest to a chicken.’ But if it’s a carnivorous bird, it’s also a little bit like a cat. So, we’ll look at those two cases and decide what seems appropriate,” he says about determining the animals’ nutritional needs.
Feeding 7,000 animals is not inexpensive. The annual nutrition budget is over $1 million. But, surprisingly, the largest animals, like elephants or rhinos, are not the most costly to feed.
“We have so many flamingos, and their food is one of the most expensive feeds because of the color that’s added to it, canthaxanthin, which helps to keep their pigments pink,” he says.
But even though the zoo’s animals receive high-quality, nutrient-rich food, they won’t always eat it. Much like a picky toddler avoiding peas on their plate, some animals just won’t eat the meals they’re given. Reppert says it’s not so much an issue with specific species but rather individual animals that may be picky eaters.
“In the past, we’ve had some very picky opossums, an animal that rummages through garbage cans,” he says. “What’s funny to me is some of these animals in the wild are associated with eating anything. Then, when you put them in captivity, it’s almost like they’re getting back at you by refusing to eat.”
Although many of the zoo’s guests like to see big, fluffy tigers or large, hefty elephants, that may not be the healthiest for that animal, Reppert says. The nutritionists regularly fine-tune a target weight range for each animal and monitor them with visual, monthly checkups. Some animals are even trained to stand on a scale.
“We definitely deal with some public misperceptions about how animals should look,” he says. “That is an area where we would like to do more education with the public.”
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Jennifer Elston | Curator of Conservation and Behavior
Keeping wild animals happy, healthy, and stimulated in a zoo setting is no small feat. Add managing the park’s recycling and a grant program to support wildlife conservation, and you have curator of conservation and behavior Jennifer Elston’s role at Fort Worth Zoo.
Elston, who has a Ph.D. in wildlife science from Texas A&M, oversees the zoo’s behavior programs, including enrichment, training, and behavioral research. Whether it’s a silverback gorilla or a sea urchin, every animal at the zoo receives daily enrichment. But enrichment looks different for every species. Where primates and big cats enjoy more novelty items like toys and food puzzles, smaller aquatic animals’ enrichment may involve making sure the temperature of their habitat is well cared for and a varied diet.
“We’re trying to bring out natural behaviors in our animals because when our animals are in a zoo, we can provide them all the healthy nutrition and vet care that they need, but an animal in the wild would spend a large portion of its day looking for food and shelter,” she says. “So that’s how we can satisfy those behavioral needs.”
A lot of creative thinking goes into planning each animal’s enrichment. Sometimes the zoo’s accounting department asks Elston about unconventional items she’s purchased, like a bubble machine for the elephants or bottles of perfume for the big cats (if you see a tiger rolling around in a pile of leaves, its keeper may have sprayed the foliage with the cat’s favorite perfume to stimulate its sense of smell). Elston also collaborated with a TCU zoo animal enrichment class for the last three years helping students invent new enrichment tools for the animals.
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Training goes hand in hand with the animal’s enrichment. Elston works closely with the keepers to create training plans for each animal to participate in their own care voluntarily. This could look like training a tortoise to stand on a scale to be weighed, teaching a giraffe to present its hip for a vaccine injection, or getting an elephant to open its mouth so keepers can check its teeth. Enrichment and training are important parts of providing great care to the zoo’s animals.
“The more we learn about animals and realize how individual they are and how sentient they are, we learn that it’s OK to talk about animals having feelings,” she says. “I like to make sure that people understand that it is important to do the best we can for animals.”
In addition to being in charge of the zoo’s behavior programs, Elston also manages the park’s recycling program and the Seeligson Conservation Fund, which has, to date, awarded over $68,000 in grants to support wildlife conservation projects in Texas.
She hopes guests of the zoo leave with a greater understanding and appreciation of animals and their environments.
“Everyone can play a role in conservation and making lives better for animals in zoos and in the wild,” she says.
