The Effects of Extraordinary Care on Animal Behavior
Dr. Megan Ross wasn’t a doctor at all when she landed her dream job at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo in the winter of 2000. Just months before at Georgia Tech, she had defended her master’s thesis on Chilean flamingos, their “pre-copulatory dances” still fresh in her mind, so many “wing salutes” and “twist preens” and all that pairing data gleaned from the flock at Zoo Atlanta.
Now here she was, curator of birds at one of the most prestigious zoos in the world, a job so perfectly tailored to her own peculiar interests she still didn’t quite believe it. “It was the greatest job I’d ever seen,” Ross says.
At just 26 years old, her PhD was still waiting behind a mountain of dissertation work, and despite what initially felt like winning the lottery, Ross soon developed a creeping bout of imposter syndrome. She questioned whether the passion she brought for science and research was especially relevant to her staff at Lincoln Park, many of whom had been working at the zoo or in the field since she was a kid and whose work-day grind with the animals seemed, at times, to preclude the lofty goals of her data-driven approach.
Her doubts continued to peck at her confidence until she found her team one morning in a heated debate: Do the penguins show more aggression when river rocks are added to their exhibit? Suddenly her worries lifted, and she arrived at a revelation that would steer her career for decades to come: This is why I’m here.
“We could start using science to answer questions like these and then change our management based on the answers we get," she says.
Over the past 22 years, Ross has risen from curator of birds to zoo director and so many critical positions in between. And in January 2022, she became the first female president and CEO in the zoo's 154-year history. It's an exciting statistic, if long overdue, and one that's landed her in nearly every major publication in Chicago.
“Given that so few women hold leadership positions in zoos and aquariums around the world, I think it's important for me to stand up and talk about that,” she says.
But she's also the first scientist and PhD to hold the position, and for Dr. Ross, the science always comes first.
