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Zooish

Wild Amazonia - Amazon Flooded Forest

The viewing area above the manatee aquarium.

Wild Amazonia - Amazon Flooded Forest
Zooish, 6 Apr 2013
    • Zooish
      The viewing area above the manatee aquarium.
    • Dicerorhinus
      I've visited the three facilities managed by this organisation and left with generally high opinion of them. I'm perplexed by this exhibit which looks as if it was constructed in a warehouse and the artificial lighting looks awful. It's particularly unfortunate given the manatees were previously exhibited in an outdoor enclosure and Singapore is the only organisation holding the species outside of it's natural range that have the climate to exhibit them outdoors. It's always difficult (and perhaps unfair) to judge anything without seeing it in person but much of river safari appears poorly designed and borderline tacky. What do you think of it spoken?
    • zooboy28
      Presumably there are practical issues with maintaining a tank of this scale outside, but it would have been awesome to see this exhibit made more naturalistic above the water. The ceiling could have been concealed with foliage for a start, which would have added greatly to the "flooded forest" idea. The walls don't look great either.
    • Zooish
      Maintaining the water quality in this aquarium was the paramount and most challenging concern for the designers, hence placing it indoors was a necessity as natural sunlight would promote algae growth too quickly. Being indoors, the aquarium surroundings are sterile, with mock-rock/painted walls and no greenery - its not wrong to say it looks somewhat "warehouse" like (it is more akin to a traditional aquarium building). Without natural sunlight, maintaining plants within the building is almost impossible, not to mention having planter beds around the tank would risk soil contaminating the water. I'm just curious as to why the designers decided to add this somewhat unattractive viewing point rather than just keep it to underwater views only.
    • zooboy28
      Thanks for the info Zooish. I was thinking artificial foliage, or even camoflague netting, could be used on the ceiling. Do you think that this upper platform might have been included for viewing manatee feeds? Weren't there "feed the manatee" experiences available for visitors at the Zoo? Perhaps they want to do something similar here, or at least use this area to show feeding at keeper talks?
    • Zooish
      Camouflage netting is used in other parts of the aquarium though. There isn't any provision for manatee feeding in the public accessible areas. This viewing area has high glass barriers which make feeding impossible. Keeper feeding talks are done at the underwater gallery.
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  • Category:
    River Wonders
    Uploaded By:
    Zooish
    Date:
    6 Apr 2013
    View Count:
    2,268
    Comment Count:
    6