Popular Web cams offer virtual visit to the zoo

While searching for a San Francisco Bay Area hotel a few weeks ago, Laurie Deddens insisted that its business center have Internet access. After all, how else could she watch the giant pandas?

"They're so cute. ... Whenever I have down time, I go check what the latest is," Deddens said. "There's news every day."

The news comes to her computer from live Web cameras — one in San Diego, one in Washington, D.C. — trained on two panda mothers and their new cubs. Deddens keeps the cams on all day, hoping to catch the pandas tending their young.

She is not alone. Web cams have been rolling in American zoos since the late 1990s — reality TV with claws and fur for millions of animal fans across the globe. For zoos competing for the attention and dollars of the public, the cams are practically mandatory.

"We've created an expectation that this is something a viewer should see on our site," said Inigo Figuracion, Web master at the San Diego Zoo. The zoo, which installed its first Internet camera in 1999, has a polar-bear cam, an ape cam and an elephant cam, along with Deddens' favorite, the panda cam.

The National Zoo, in Washington, D.C., has a herd of cams capturing the movements, or snoozing, of 18 different species. There are cams for highly popular animals, such as Sumatran tigers and cheetahs, but also for the oddly appealing: black-footed ferrets and naked mole rats.

And people are watching.

The July 9 birth of a male panda cub at the National Zoo generated 637,000 visits to the zoo's panda Web page over a three-day period, said Peper Long, a zoo spokeswoman. The heavy flow of virtual visitors eager to view Mei Xiang and her baby caused the zoo's cameras to crash for days.

"While people were watching and were interested in Mei Xiang's pregnancy, it was nothing like when the cub was born," Long said.

True, other cams are more popular. A NASA cam got 2.4 million hits during the recent Discovery shuttle launch. But the zoo-cam fans are a dedicated bunch. San Diego Zoo officials noticed an odd spike in panda-cam hits late at night in July. They realized the viewers were from the United Kingdom and were logging on when they arrived at work.

Animal fans will wait, sometimes for weeks, to catch a glimpse, sometimes fleeting and blurry, of their favorite species.

After seeing Mei Xiang's baby on camera for the first time this month, Deddens was so excited she freeze-framed the image and e-mailed it to close friends.

"I could see, in the curve of her arm, something moving and I knew that was it," she said. "The thing that was really thrilling to me was to see the mother pick up her little cub ... she was so gentle with it — such a good mom."

Not all cams are created equal, and sometimes they demand patience.

The cameras tend to focus on one spot and a viewer can wait a long time before a flamingo or octopus or golden lion tamarin wanders into the frame. At Sea World in San Diego, the orca cam captures a grainy undulating blue square occasionally eclipsed by the fleeting black shape of the killer whale.

Catering to looky-loos, some zoos vamped up their technology by adding broadband capabilities, buying servers and hiring Web staff. These upgrades, some say, raised viewers' expectations of what a zoo Web site should look like.

"The first introduction many people will have with a zoo will be on the Web," said Jane Cross, a Web-team manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. "If you look like you don't have your act together, what does it say about your institution?"

Surveys conducted by the aquarium, she said, prove the importance of having a strong Web site. In 2005, she said, 40 percent of visitors reported that the aquarium's Web site influenced their decision to travel there. In 2003, that number was 25 percent.

But having a Web camera doesn't always translate into higher attendance or donations. Despite several camera additions, the San Diego Zoo was unable to stanch a drop in yearly visitors. Attendance dropped from 3.5 million to 3.2 million in 2001 and has remained stable since.

"The fact you can see something on a camera doesn't necessarily translate into people visiting your zoo," said Jane Ballentine, with the American Zoo and Aquarium Association. "A lot of this [Internet traffic] has to do with curiosity ... and immediate gratification."

New-media expert Jeffrey Cole agrees.

"Before, you could go to a library and get a book and wait for National Geographic or a handful of television channels to do a special," said Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications. "Now, if you're interested in pandas, you don't have to wait."