The two panda brothers Pit and Paule brought animal success to the zoo on Facebook Photo: picture alliance/dpa/dpa-Zentralbild | Paul Zinken
By Oliver Ohmann
As a public limited company, the Zoological Garden must submit an annual report every year. The 4,000 shareholders just had the balance sheet for the 2021 financial year in the mail. An exciting read!
“Like the previous year, 2021 was strongly influenced by the Covid 19 pandemic,” writes zoo director Andreas Knieriem to the shareholders. “Nevertheless, the second year of Corona gave some cause for hope.”
Revenues from admission fees increased slightly by 2.6 percent to EUR 14.6 million compared to 2020.
A total of 2.34 million visitors came. For comparison: in 2019 (before Corona) the zoo had 3.72 million visitors! In plain language: Due to Corona, the zoo lost 1.5 million visitors per year.
19,443 animals from 1074 species live in the zoo and are cared for by 265 employees on average over the year (2019: 291 employees). The animal feed devoured 948,723 euros, including a fifth for the bamboo of the panda stars alone. Pit and Paule eat 105 kilograms every day, almost 38 tons per year.
Speaking of Pit and Paule. The panda brothers also gave the zoo its biggest online hit of the year. Her “best of” video on the occasion of her second birthday on August 31, 2021 was viewed 2.1 million times on Facebook, plus 55,000 likes.
Since 2018, the number of Facebook followers has almost doubled to 183,000. The zoo and animal park together have 21,500 YouTube subscribers and 26,800 Twitter fans.
