Does anybody know when the hunting dogs are arriving at chester?

RioZoo
This a very large collection which is the oldest zoo in Brazil. It is located in the center of the city, not in the southern part of Rio de janiero where the lovely botanical gardens are. The zoo has very outdated instalations, most of the animals are still in wire mesh cages or fences. However, the collection itself is important.
RioZoo is notable for primates: 3 species of spider monkeys,5 species of capuchin monkeys, squirrel monkeys,2 species of titi monkeys, 2 species of saki monkey, howler monkeys, night monkeys. This is the small primate collection: goeldi´s monkey, pied tamarin,emperor marmoset, black tamarin, tassle eared marmoset, silvery marmoset, golden headed lion marmoset, common marmoset, golden marmoset, black pincel marmoset. There are also 3 species of baboon, 3 species of macaque, and vervets monkeys. A row of moated enclousures hold 2 groups of chimpanzees, orangutans and a family of mandrill.
There are moated areas for andean bear and brown bear, river otter and a nice island for crab eating foxes. Also a large area for maned wolf. A long carnivore area ( cages) has lions, bengal tiger, leopard, black panther, jaguar, puma, european lynx, 1 european wolf, jaguarundi, ocelot, bushdog, a very active tayra, along with coatis and amazon raccoon. Other brazilian mammals include great anteater, tamandua, capibara, tapirs in long spacious pens. The other mammals are 2 giraffes, a dromedary, nile hippos in a very spacious pool, llamas, auodads on a cliffside and an asian elephant in a very small pen. A nocturnal house is closed for renovation.
Riozoo excels in birds. Again in very old cages. A large flight cage holds egyptian ibis, peacocks, roseate spoonbill, scarlet ibis, great heron and white faced ducks. Birds of prey includes harpy eagles, andean condors, king vultures, seriemas and others. Various species of owl. Vultures, egrets and boat billed herons are free and nest in colonies in the zoo. There are also ostrich, nańdu, emu and a cassowary. Many species of toucans and cracids. Here are the parrots, blue and scarlet macaws in a large cage at the entrance, white belly parrot, black headed parrot, ring necked parrekeet, short tailed parrot, blue headed parrot, black headed conure, red shouldered macaw, white headed conure, illger´s macaw, mealy parrot, red fronted macaw, hynacinth macaws, miltary macaw, red masked parrot,saly headed parrot,yellow fronted parrot,red caped parrot,crimson conure and golden conures, which are very loved in Brazil.
There is a notable new enclousure, a very tall caged cliff with a pair of lear´s macaw, that the sign says that are the only pair on exhibit in any zoo.
There is a small reptile house with reticulated pythons, ball pythons, anaconda, rainbow boa, boa constrictor, S.A. rattlesnake, 2 species of fer- de -lance, gabon viper, puffing snake, tropical rat snake,cururu toad, green boa and a florida softshell turtle. Outside there are islands with large green iguanas, 2 species of S.A. tortoises, pools with 4 species of caiman, and a large pool for black amazon turtles, mud turtles and yellow necked sliders.
There is also a small farm with domestic animals.
This is the main zoo. Outside there is a new section called Pasarela do Fauna. It begins with a very large mixed species pen which includes red deer, many nańdu (rheas), crested screamers, S.A. geese and ducks, and more turtles. After this a small fresh water aquarium with mostly amazon fishes in good tanks, such as pacu, oscar, pirana, ciclid and diverse catfish. A loggerhead turtle lives in a spacious but very empty tank.
When i can i will post some pictures.

To celebrate Children’s Day, Jurong Bird Park will conduct a special GO, GLOW, GROW, Challenge for pre-schoolers and primary school students. The two-hour programme will teach the little ones the different diets of birds by allowing them to observe, smell and touch seeds and other food at the feeding stations at various locations within the Park, such as the World of Darkness, Lory Loft, and Pelican Cove.



Date: 27 September – 1 October 2010
Time: 9.00am – 3.00pm
Cost: Free (park admission charges apply)
Age: Pre-schoolers and primary schools (bookings by schools only)

For more information visit http://www.birdpark.com.sg

Jurong Bird Park

Jurong Bird Park is home to a world-class avian hospital and now, the public can learn how park veterinarians keep the birds in the pink of health in a special tour of the hospital on 12 September. Facilities that will be open to visitors include the treatment room, X-ray facility, surgery room, avian recovery room, and pharmacy.



Date: Sunday, 12 September 2010 (Sunday)
Time: Session 1 – 10.00am; Session 2 – 11.45am (45 mins per session)
Duration: 45 mins per tour
Fee: $16.00 per participant (exclusive of park admission)
Capacity: 20 pax per session

For more information visit http://www.birdpark.com.sg


Jurong Bird Park

I visit zoos in Mexico and other parts of the world. I have reviews, photos and will share with you on zoos and animals i have noticed that do not appear often on zoochat.

During the visit to the zoo last month, I found only one individual on display for many species, for example, leopard cat, golden cat, clouded leopard, Malay tiger, jaguar, Prevost's squirrel, Sri Lanka giant squirrel, kinkajou, binturong. Then where are the other individuals? Is there off-exhibit area in the zoo? Do the animals off-exhibit enjoy similar enclosure and treatment as the on-exhibit animals?
Meanwhile, the water in the tank of the manatee was so dirty that I could only see the the nostril of the manatee when it surfaced to breath. Another disappointment was the lack of a water pool for Malay tapirs. And I also failed to visit the Fragile Forest bacause it was closed to public during that time, and I missed the Malay civet, serval, bat-eared fox, dhole, sloth bear, anoa, red-river hog, tarsier and barasingha during the visit to Night Safari....What a pity!

I was wondering now we're at the end of the summer season, have any zoo goers noticed a decline in visitor numbers at their local zoos? The reason I ask is because throughout the past 3 months I have visited Paignton, Blackpool and Twycross zoos and have been surprised at how quiet they were. (They weren't empty, just had a lot fewer visitors than I have seen previously and would expect during peak season). Has the recession hit any zoos particularly noticably? Or are people just moving away from that sort of entertainment? Or have I just been lucky/unlucky (depending on how busy you like a zoo to be when visiting) on my three trips?

I have added one of these to the photography forum as well but because it is mainly UK Based I thought I'd drop a copy on here as well

I hope to start a website shortly with the aim to get young people interested in zoo or wildlife park photography, what I would like is as much input as possible from my fellow zoo chatters as to what problems you have incurred and how you have solved them.
Which are the best enclosures and easiest ones to take photographs at.
How you find the accessabilty to the enclosures for photography.
When is the best time to go your local collection for the best photographs.
What is your zoo doing to encourage youngsters to take photographs of their collections
Any help would be gratefully recieved

I hope to start a website shortly with the aim to get young people interested in zoo or wildlife park photography, what I would like is as much input as possible from my fellow zoo chatters as to what problems you have incurred and how you have solved them.
Which are the best enclosures and easiest ones to take photographs at.
How you find the accessabilty to the enclosures for photography.
When is the best time to go your local collection for the best photographs.
What is your zoo doing to encourage youngsters to take photographs of their collections
Any help would be gratefully recieved

Today's Aquarium des Lagons (the Noumea Aquarium) had its beginnings way back in the 1930s when French colonial Rene Catala was a farmer and amateur lepidopterist on the island of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. He first became interested in marine life in 1934, and just a few years later opened a simple aquarium there. However contraction of malaria meant he had to abandon Madagascar and retire to France to convalesce where he was recommended by his doctor to move to New Caledonia (doctors obviously gave better advice in those days!). It wasn't until 1945 that Rene made the move, along with his new Swiss wife Irene. He still harboured a dream of building a marine laboratory and aquarium, and as luck would have it he arrived in Noumea at the time that the American troops were pulling out (this being the end of World War 2 of course), leaving behind masses of equipment and property. Rene not only salvaged considerable amounts of this abandoned gear but also managed to convince the remaining American authorities to let him have a huge complex of 70 buildings and all the equipment within them that had served as an army hospital and staff quarters. These buildings became the Institut Francais d'Oceanie, composed of not just a marine laboratory but also a mining institute [New Caledonia's main income today is through nickel mining], an agricultural school, and a botanical studies institute. Once the institute was up and running, the French government basically thanked Rene for his work, closed down the marine laboratory part, and sent him on his way. With great bitterness Rene set off in 1952 to do a grand tour of European public aquariums before returning to New Caledonia the next year, where he used his own finances to buy land in the south of Noumea and set up an independant marine laboratory. He had pipelines laid running out 300ft offshore to pump seawater in through his tanks, and employed divers to collect specimens from the surrounding lagoon and reefs. Rene remained in ownership of the Aquarium until ill-health forced his retirement in 1975, when he unwillingly handed it over to the city. It immediately came under the jurisdiction of ORSTROM, the very scientific institute that Rene had originally founded after the war and whom the government had forced him out of.

For anyone who had visited the Noumea Aquarium in the past, you wouldn't recognise it today -- because its an entirely different building! The site of the old aquarium is now the carpark, and the new one sits beside it. People who judge Aquariums purely by their size probably wouldn't be very impressed because it isn't terribly big, but that's only to be expected given that the Noumean population isn't very large and there's only a limited number of tourists. It is situated very conveniently for the bulk of those tourists however, being directly between the two main beaches so I suspect the majority of tourists do pay it a visit. It is certainly on the schedule for most of the cruise ship passengers that pass through the town. Everything displayed in the tanks is local, which for me makes it more interesting than just a general sort of Aquarium (although being a tropical Pacific country, many of the marine species displayed actually are those typical reef fish that you see in every Aquarium around the world!).

The first part of the Aquarium is the freshwater section. This look really nice. Rather than just having tanks set in the walls with a few plaques of information beside them, the freshwater area is a spacious-looking and fairly brightly-lit room with planted beds in the floor and around the walls, which are themselves partly covered in rockwork. The fish here are species that can be commonly found in the streams and lower reaches of New Caledonian waterways, including several species of flagtails (Kuhlia), gobies and mullets, as well as speckled longfin eel (Anguilla reinhardtii) and long-spined glassfish (Ambassis interrupta)

Connecting the freshwater and marine parts of the Aquarium is, appropriately enough, the brackish area which in this case literally is a bridge between the two. From the freshwater area there is a short wooden "bridge" (but on the floor, not raised) with a small mangrove exhibit on either side. At first I thought that's all it was, but upon looking closer I discovered that on one side there were fiddler crabs scuttling amongst the mangrove seedlings while on the other side were mudskippers. There are just two brackish tanks after the bridge, a large one for various fish that can be found amongst the mangroves at high tide (mullets, scats, monos, rabbitfish, etc) and a smaller one for juvenile fish and a huge mud crab. The crab was not in a position that enabled me to photograph it successfully so I just took a photo of the tank with a blob in the corner that is the crab.

The tropical marine sections of the Aquarium are divided amongst several rooms, although there doesn't seem to be any sort of theme to most of them apart for that they are all tropical marine. The obligatory "touch tank" is nicely-constructed although as is so often the case many of the inhabitants can't really be touched (various corals, damselfish, small puffers, etc). [I'll just add in here I'm not at all a fan of touch tanks with their poor abused little residents]. The sea-grass tank and sand-flat reef tank are very nice, the former with an odd little fish that I think was a sabre-tooth blenny of some kind (Petroscirtes) and the latter with a crocodile-fish (a flathead, of the family Platycephalidae) but neither were on the labelling so I'm not sure of their specific identities. The fairly sizeable reef tank here had a nice selection of soft and hard corals and standard reef fish (including a very cute baby trumpetfish Aulostomus). There was also a very unusually-designed tank for baby leopard sharks (Stegastoma fasciatum) which reminded me of a glass-topped school desk coming out of the wall; the baby leopard sharks are totally unlike the adults, being black and white striped (hence an alternative name of "zebra shark").

After this first room is a completely-darkened one for corals. It was back in 1958 that Rene Catala and his wife, the founders of the Noumea Aquarium, first discovered that the living parts of corals (i.e. not the "skeleton") glow under ultra-violet light. This is now a well-known fact but I've never actually seen it shown in an Aquarium before, although I'm sure it must be widely done because it is very effective. Some tourists I talked to later in the week had been to the Aquarium and they said they didn't like this coral room because the flourescence seemed unnatural (i.e. not the way you'd see corals if you were just diving off the reef) but I thought it was very interesting. Also in here was a tank for flashlight fish, again something I've never personally seen in an Aquarium. The species displayed here are of the genera Anomalops and Photoblepharon. They carry bioluminescent bacteria in pockets under each eye, which can be flashed on and off by opening and closing the pocket. Being a completely black tank set in a black wall in a black room, I didn't even see them on my first circuit of the Aquarium (or rather, I did, but I thought the flashes of light were reflections from other items). Once I spotted them on my second run I was fascinated; all you could see were green strobes going on and off as the fish signalled one another. Very cool.

The next part of the Aquarium has a collection of small tanks for dangerous fish such as stonefish and lionfish, as well as small spiny lobsters, crown-of-thorn starfish (the scourge of the reefs), shrimpfish etc, followed by a large reef tank and a tank for sea snakes. Two species of sea snakes are displayed here, the banded sea snake (Laticauda laticaudata) which is boldly marked in white and black stripes, and the endemic Laticauda saintgironsi (split from L. colubrina in 2006) which is very attractive with its salmon and black banding. Some very small tanks in this area had small corals etc, as well as a monstrously-large mantis shrimp which I took a photo of with my hand next to the glass for scale.

After the main marine tank (the largest in the Aquarium but still not overly large) there is another darkened room for deep-sea creatures. The main exhibit here is the nautilus tank. Compared to the nautilus tanks I've seen in other Aquariums this one was really big, a cylinder tank about six foot or more high and several feet across, and the nautilus were the largest specimens I've seen anywhere. What I found most interesting here was that unlike other Aquariums where the nautilus are kept in well-lit tanks and they always just seem to lie on the bottom, here each individual was using their mass of tentacles as a holdfast to suck onto the rockwork or the sides of the tank, which I could imagine must be what they do in the wild as well. The Noumea Aquarium pioneered the keeping of nautilus. The first live one was obtained in 1958 (although at that time the facility was a private marine laboratory and not open to the public) and they've been keeping them ever since then. In 1960 they had 40 Nautilus in their tanks at one time! There had only been one Nautilus kept in captivity prior to Noumea's 1958 one, and that was at the aquarium in Sydney, where it survived for just a week. They laid eggs often at the Aquarium but these all proved infertile, and it wasn't until 1985 that the first young were hatched in captivity - at the Waikiki Aquarium in Hawaii - after it was discovered that although adult Nautilus survive just fine at constant temperatures (so long as they are cool temperatures) they cannot be bred successfully unless they are given the daily temperature fluctutations that they experience in nature during their vertical migrations to the surface each night to feed.

The other couple of tanks here were for deep-sea crabs but the fronts of their tanks were covered in condensation (a common problem with chilled tanks) and the signage wasn't well enough lit to read.

As mentioned, I did a second lap of the Aquarium to make sure I hadn't missed anything (like the flashlight fish!). The giftshop by the exit/entrance was closed so I couldn't browse what was on offer. Although a fairly small Aquarium I spent about two hours there, and I enjoyed it very much.


[NOTE: the information on Rene Catala, the Aquarium's history, and the keeping of nautilus there are all obtained from Peter Douglas-Ward's 1988 book "In Search Of Nautilus"]


Photos will be uploaded when there is a Gallery for them (so it may be a little while)

Hello there, New to the site after chatting with a chap in the Tsavo Aviary at Chester Zoo last week who told me all about it - so here I am!

Chester is my home Zoo but I love experiencing others obviously

I already like the look of the site :)

Hey all, just some general questions really...

Just been looking at some of the pics of the current Seaquarium on Clacton Pier. (Which I had previously thought was one of the Sealife branch!)
Correct me if i'm wrong but, it doesn't look a very exciting aquarium- how big is it? It it basically in the warehouse from the old dolphinarium? And why exactly did they get rid of the Sea lion show? I would have thought that it would have been a great seaside crowd-drawer!

Does anyone know what is happening with the old dolphinarium/sea lion pools?

Thanks.

As I go to my local zoo every 10 days I have got to know a few keepers pretty well and we were having a little chat the other day on what could be done with very little work needed.
I then said to them that the zoo (Dudley) really lacked a good collection of deer, I feel it is made for deer as there is a great amount of spare land on a incline and this could suit many species of deer
This would also help keep the vegitation down as well and give the general public something to study as they went round the zoo other than the regular animals
Now what about your local zoo what do you think is missing fromt he zoo and would cost very little to bring in but would be adventagious to both the zoo and the general public.
Can't wait to here your ideas

First let me say, I am one of those people that takes the card and glass
and carries scary looking spiders outside instead of killing them, so you see where I fit in. (I don't mind if the sneak back in, just don't want to see them again)

However, in my travels I have met individuals that claim that this earth is destined to take care of itself and it's not really our job to monitor or care for it. The care of the planet and its occupants are left to the concern
of a higher power.

What do you think?

Chuck
Big Cat Information and Pictures of Panthers, Lions, Tigers, and many others

My name is Chuck and I have really just begun discovering zoos.
My thing has always been big cats and that is usually what I am
looking for in my occasional visits to zoos. After reading some of the
posts on this site I can see that there are some very serious zoo
visitors out there.

Even so, I think I will go add my two cents in the other forums areas.
(Oh, and Go Binder Park Zoo!)

Chuck King
Big Cat Information and Pictures of Panthers, Lions, Tigers, and many others