Odd, eerie and cool: Minnesota Zoo shares animal X-rays

They're some of Minnesota's most familiar transplants: the animals, fish and birds at the Minnesota Zoo in Apple Valley.

Visitors, however, rarely get to see inside the zoo's residents.

But where there are fish, fowl and fur, there are veterinarians, and modern veterinary medicine uses many of the same tools as human health care providers.

Including X-rays.

The Minnesota Zoo has a full-time and part-time veterinarian on staff, as well as two veterinary technicians — essentially animal nurses.

Lesanna Lahner has been the main veterinarian at the zoo since 2017 and said radiographs are a key tool for looking after the health of over 5,000 animals.

She shared a few examples from the zoo's files with MPR News.

"The keepers work hard to do what we call 'medical behaviors,'" Lahner said. "They train the animals to participate in their health care. They train them to sit still for us to listen to their chest with a stethoscope or palpate their abdomen. And one of the most important behaviors is actually to allow radiographs."

The black-and-white images are used to diagnose buoyancy problems in fish and confirm pregnancies in armadillos. They check tiger knees and help zookeepers monitor chinchilla dental care.

It's part of a whole host of strategies for animal care — made more complicated by the fact that there are lots of animals, and none of them can tell vets what might be wrong.

"We have to kind of figure out from clinical signs," Lahner said. "Limping. Or, an animal chewing on one side, we start to get suspicious their teeth hurt. Little things like that really clue us in. So we have to be very perceptive, and we work very closely with the keepers that know their animals very well."

The zoo owns digital X-ray equipment that can be adapted for use in fish tanks, or with nursing animals, ready for all kinds of situations with unpredictable and unusual patients.

"Radiographs are one of my favorite things," Lahner said. "They tell us a lot about what's going on inside of an animal and there's really no risk.

"People may be concerned about the radiation exposure. I always try to remind people that taking a flight, you get more radiation exposure going up that high in the atmosphere than you do with some radiographs," she said. "Really, it's a safe thing to do."

Correction (March 5, 2019): Lesanna Lahner's name was misspelled in a previous version of this story.