Salary
Average Salary: $57,710
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $2,409,000
You probably won't ever become fabulously wealthy as a zoologist (source). Don't count on carpeting your whole house in bearskin rugs...oh, you probably wouldn't be into that anyway.
Even though being a zoologist will never bring you a life of Lear jets, you can eventually earn a decent living. Starting salaries for zoologists average between $31,000 and $46,000 a year. You won't be guzzling caviar for fun, but you'll still be able go out for a nice dinner once a week without blowing the budget.
As the number of years you put in grows, the amount of money you make will go up as well (unless your boss thinks it's fun to make you suffer). After five to nine years of experience, average zoologist salaries range from around $40,000 to $53,000, while zoologists with ten to twenty years under their belts can make between $45,000 and $65,000 (source).
So yeah, you're still not at guzzling-caviar-for-fun level, but that's kind of gross anyway.
Keep in mind that no matter how many years of experience you have in the field, you might not be able to land the higher paying jobs without higher education (source). A master's, a PhD—our crystal ball tells us that these are in your future if you ever want to make decent money. These are absolute requirements if you ever want to be in the top ten percent of zoologists who can make up to $91,000 a year. If you manage this, we figure some caviar guzzling is cool for special occasions.