We all woke up bright and early Thursday morning for our backstage safari tour of Animal Kingdom. The main function of the tour was to show us how Disney maintains all of the animals on property given that most of them in the wild would require miles of space to be able to live. After slipping backstage, we saw how they manage each animal according to its species. For example, giraffes have a specialized two-story building where they sleep at night, whereas monkeys have to live in a bunker-like structure because they are clever enough to escape the habitats of similar-size animals. Each animal sleeps backstage in their enclosures rather than in the actual safari, and while they’re in the safari, Disney uses a combination of natural and artificial barriers to keep some animals separated from others. For example, the lions are surrounded by a moat not visible to people on the Kilimanjaro Safari so that they are unable to reach the zebras. Another such example is how they use cattle guards—pipes that require a dexterity level greater than that of cows in order to be crossed—to deter animals from leaving their section of the safari and entering that of another animal.
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My (Jamey) personal highlight of the tour was being able to stand about five feet away from a 3,000 pound white rhino. Probably the closest I’ll ever be to one (here’s hoping). One thing I learned on the trip was that black rhinos have a problem with iron absorption. They absorb so much of it that the iron concentration in their bloodstream can actually kill them when they are housed in zoos. Disney circumvents this problem by giving them phlebotomies regularly, thus keeping their iron levels down and the rhinos healthy. We also saw the skull of an American Lion, which I previously had not known to have existed, apparently the biggest of all the cats before going extinct approximately 11,000 years ago.
After the backstage tour, we began collecting data for ride output and average party size for Expedition Everest, and we also collected data on how many people Disney puts on each raft for the Kali River Rapids. For Everest, what we’re doing is spacing ourselves out every ten people in the single rider line and then recording data on both the posted standby time, posted single-rider time, actual time in line, and then the average amount of people per party in the regular standby line, with hopes that we can eventually calculate the benefit of riding single-rider and also the throughput for Expedition Everest. This, of course, required that we ride the roller coaster several times, but we put up with it in the name of statistical analysis. We got lots of interesting looks from fellow riders as we craned our necks to see how many people were in each party and as we recorded information on our tablets and notebooks, and people inevitably asked us what we were doing. Jordan got so tired of explaining the trip that he eventually resorted to telling people he was working for NASA or that he designed the ride.
For Kali River Rapids, we stood on the bridge overhanging the ride and counted how many people were seated in each raft so that we might eventually see how many people Disney is not fitting per ride in terms of capacity, then comparing the theoretical optimal output of the ride with the actual output which we observed.
We are making headway on the Magic Kingdom algorithm; before long, we should have it up and running and showing us the optimal touring plan for the park. We have begun data collection on our new project of examining single rider lines and average throughput, but we still have (get) to collect data on Test Track, Rockin’ Roller Coaster, and Tower of Terror. Today we made good progress; hopefully tomorrow we might notice some peculiar trend in the data and perhaps get some insight from it. We’re waking up early tomorrow for our Epcot tour, tomorrow will be a busy day. Oh yeah, and Stella almost died stepping out of the Backstage Safari van.
Jamey and Joey
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