The Nation’s Zoos Know You Need to See Cute Animals Right Now

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/zoo-animals-twitter.html

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The news can seem grim. Refugee crises, extreme weather and wars plague the globe. Cellphones have exploded. America is bitterly divided. Mary Tyler Moore died. Even the doomsday clock has been reset.

But we thought you could use a break, whatever your politics, your fears, your troubles. The nation’s zoos agree. Welcome to the Great National Cute Animal Tweet-Off of 2017.

Over the past two days, zoos and aquariums have dominated the conversation on Twitter with photo after photo of adorable animals. And the world cracked a smile.

It all started, according to The Virginian-Pilot, with a Smithsonian National Zoo announcement on Wednesday of the birth of a female gray seal on Jan. 21, a pup described as “nursing, moving and bonding well with mom.”

The baby’s mother, a 33-year-old gray seal named Kara, set a record for being the oldest seal of her kind to give birth in a zoo. (The Washington Post even had a Facebook Live presentation of her ultrasound in December.)

The seal’s birth was a reminder that gray seals moved from the endangered list to being a species of least concern in 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Their numbers rose to more than 600,000 worldwide.

The Smithsonian birth announcement set off a ripple online, and generated a hashtag — #CuteAnimalTweetOff — which grew into a viral phenomenon as zoos posted photos of cute and fuzzy pandas, otters, orangutans and tiger cubs. There is even a baby turtle, as well as a pun or two, in the fray.

“Here we have an otterly adorable submission to #CuteAnimalTweetOff,” the Aquarium of the Pacific said on Twitter with a photo of otters.

“Leapin’ Lemurs the #cuteanimaltweetoff is going strong,” the Maryland Zoo wrote with a photo of a lemur.

The postings have gone international, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, we can find common ground across borders by looking at cute animals. The ZSL London Zoo raised the bar with a few seconds of video of its tiger cubs Karis and Achilles, born in June.

Sarah Janet Hill, a host at Radio Free Radio in Hampton, Va., has been credited with giving the Smithsonian announcement the online bump it needed to spread.

“I thought, ‘Our seals are cuter than that,’ ” Ms. Hill is quoted as saying in The Virginian-Pilot. So she retweeted the announcement to the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center, which took up the challenge.

The viral response to the pup’s birth announcement has been a pleasant surprise for the Smithsonian Zoo. Annalisa Meyer, a spokeswoman, said on Thursday that the seal pup had not yet been given a name, a process that includes taking suggestions from the public or giving a sponsor the opportunity to come up with one.

“We have never set off a cute animal challenge,” Ms. Meyer said. “Will it be the last? Maybe not. We are open to more cute tweet-offs.”

But to what end? Maybe the point is just relief from the drumbeat of sober news.

“It’s been a really fun day, and I’m just glad there was something light to talk about today,” Ms. Hill told The Virginian-Pilot. “There’s been some heavy news lately, and it’s been fun to distract people with this fun stuff.”

“Everyone wants their zoo to win,” she added, but really, there were no winners or losers in the standoff.

Just cute animals.