Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been widely used to search for optimal strategies for the planning and management of water resources systems, particularly reservoir operation. This study provides a comprehensive diagnostic assessment of state of the art of the non-animal–inspired EA applications to reservoir optimization. This type of EAs does not mimic biologic traits and group strategies of animal (wild) species. A search of pertinent papers was applied to the journal citation reports (JCRs). A bibliometric survey identified 14 pertinent non-animal–inspired EAs, such as the genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), and differential evolution (DE) algorithms, most of which have a number of modified versions. The characteristics of non-animal–inspired EAs and their modified versions were discussed to identify the difference between EAs and how each EA was improved. Additionally, the type of application of non-animal–inspired EAs to different case studies was investigated, and comparisons were made between the performance of the applied EAs in the studied literature. The survey revealed that the GA is the most frequently applied algorithm, followed by the DE algorithm. Non-animal–inspired EAs are superior to the classical methods of reservoir optimization (e.g., the non-linear programming and dynamic programming) due to faster convergence, diverse solution space, and efficient objective function evaluation. Several non-animal–inspired EAs of recent vintage have been shown to outperform the classic GA, which was the first evolutionary algorithm applied to reservoir operation.