To her dinner guests, Aleine York serves only the crunchiest mealworms, the tastiest fish, the freshest cattle blood. As director of the commissary, York is the queen of takeout to 187 species of animals, catering to a wide range of appetites and dietary needs.
Some animals eat twice a day.
Others, once a week. If the animals don't eat well, they don't look good and they don't reproduce, and then the people won't come. It's as simple as that. Keeping up with all that food, however, from the apple chunks to the trout chow, is not simple and gets more complicated with the acquisition of each new species. The addition of North America, when it's completed, will have doubled the total animal collection from 800 to 1,600 individual animals.