Anyone have any high concept exhibit ideas?

I watched a documentary how polar bears break into seal dens half rearing up and pushing down with their arms.

I imagined a polar bear exhibit where visitors can interact with the bears, observe bears strength and provide them with enrichment at the same time. There is a balanced metal beam, not unlike a children swing, going between bear and visitor areas. On the visitor side, it is weighted with, say, 200 kg. Visitors can press a button, which releases some dog pellets into a transparent tube located on top for the beam. The polar bear can press the beam on his side, lifting 200 kg and replicating the movement of breaking the ice above a seal den. Then the pellets roll down along the beam to his side, fall down, and the bear can eat them. There would be a similar device inside visitors area, where a family could check how many people are needed to press down 200 kg.

 

An open air exhibit for indian subcontinent vultures (e.g white-rumped and long-billed vultures) detailing their roles in parsi zoroastrian and tibetan cultures via dakhmas and sky burials, located on a hill, with livestock corpses being placed weekly in it. In fact, off-show there would be special section where elderly zoogoers could actually arrange to be buried there once they die and let the vultures eat them. Proceeds from the funerals would help vulture populations in India as well as helping to educate farmers on how to properly dispose of medicine that has been linked to vulture declines.

 

Wow, good luck advertising that

 

That's disturbing.

 

@BigNate - I'd think it would be best to mine the controversy

@elefante - Yeah its disturbing, but the general theme would be that this is (or was) normal, and that we should respect other cultures' beliefs, no matter how gross they may seem to us.

As an alternate approach to my vulture exhibit, just have the exhibit a replica of a dakhma with cattle substituting for humans.

 

If I was to allow my body to be eaten by something, I would chooses a tiger or a lion before vultures

 

I thought of this as a concept for the Philadelphia Zoo, though it seems WAAAAY too ambitious. Here goes:
An underground building that serves as the holding for African Elephants, Rock Hyrax, and exhibits for Aardvark, Elephant Shrews, and Manatees, approrpriately titled "Afrotheria". The elephants would go outside via ramp into a massive stimulated Miombo Woodland which they share with cheetahs/kudus/common duikers. All trees would be preserved, the "train ride", pony and draft horse rides would be obliterated beyond existence, and the elephant exhibit would seem to have no barriers (ha-ha moats that slope down), yet the elephants would look down upon guests.

 

Another idea I have had regarding an ecological exhibit type is focusing on a habitat as it changes through the year. Obviously, it would be difficult to easily replicate this with a temperate habitat such as a deciduous woodland, but somewhere like the Amazon flooded rainforest with its specific wet and dry seasons could have a very effective exhibit designed for it:

Dry Season
- Exposed sandbanks are used by nesting colonies of giant river turtles; I have recently heard that these reptiles may be one of the most ecologically important animals in the Amazon Basin (as important to these tropical forests as salmon are to the seasonal forests of western North America), so would be a good focus species
- Fish end up trapped in small pools where they are vulnerable to attack by predators, especially caiman and waterbirds
- When the first rains do come, it can rob these pools of oxygen and produce huge fish kills which in turn feed scavengers (lesser yellow-headed vultures are particularly reliant on these events); it could be represented perhaps with a pool of water in which a number of hollow rubber fish are floated

Wet Season
- Many invertebrates that sense the changing humidity perform a large-scale vertical migration from the forest floor up into the rainforest canopy
- Freed from their dry season pools, fish move into the flooded forests where they feed up both on fruits produced by trees that disperse their seeds via water and the abovementioned invertebrates dislodged by wind or rain; notes could also be made on those species specialised to camouflage against sunken leaves (matamata, Surinam toad, leaffish) and how many fish use electricity to navigate among the branches
- The decay of leaves in the water robs it of oxygen, so forcing many fish such as arapaima and electric eels to gulp water from the surface

 

A big naturalistic African savanna exhibit that’s also a walkthrough aviary, and when I say “big” I mean MASSIVE. It’s got your typical African hoofstock enclosures with giraffes, antelope, zebras, rhinos, etc, and the whole complex is covered by aviary mesh. African birds such as storks, cranes, vultures, flamingos, waterfowl, hornbills, guineafowl, bustards, weavers, rollers, starlings, bee-eaters and more are allowed to fly freely within the exhibit complex; none of the birds are pinioned or have their wings clipped. I think having exotic birds flying overhead would make the exhibit feel more alive and immersive than your average african savanna exhibit. I guess the big issues would be whether a massive aviary like this would be structurally and economically feasible. I can dream though.

 

One rather high concept exhibit idea would be attempting to accurately recreate a phumdi - a floating island made from mats of soil, plants and organic matter at various stages of decomposition that is all naturally bundled together. They are only found on Loktak Lake in the Indian state of Manipur and the largest phumdi is the last remaining natural home of the Manipur brow-antlered deer. Even if the Manipur brow-antlered deer were replaced with another subspecies, the effort of constructing an actual floating island would be rather immense.

An exhibit at least themed on this habitat could potentially be quite rewarding - there are apparently a variety of other species that utilise the phumdi habitat such as hog and sambar deer, Indian python, Eurasian otter and Temminck's golden cat (although finding a definitive list of what occurs on the floating meadows themselves, versus what is living in the surrounding area, is quite difficult).

 

Here are a couple I had:

An Okavango Delta exhibit with exhibits that flood during part of the year.

A burrowing animal house actually underground.

A huge indoor rainforest many, many, many, many times larger than any ever made ever before, with tons of mostly free roaming animals.

 

An underground exhibit would be so cool!

In regards to that rainforest, it reminds me of an idea I had for a river safari park. Like, instead of driving a car through a big area, you'd take a boat down a river and view animals (both terrestrial and aquatic) from the boat. A rainforest area would be a really cool environment for that sort of thing. Like, imagine an Amazon one, where in different areas you can see tropical birds, jaguars, ocelots, primates, and more. And there could even be aquatic animals like fish, turtles, caiman, manatees, river otters, and river dolphins.

 

I really want to see an aquarium do this someday. There are some underwater buildings and tunnels in the ocean but none by a major aquarium. It would be especially cool if (and remember, these are high concept ideas, lol) if they could go out deep enough where you might see some larger and open ocean marine life, as opposed to just what hangs out in the shallows.

 

An exhibit complex for asian elephants and both domestic and wild donkeys, themed around the Republican and Democratic parties' mascots. The exhibit would be divided into two sections, with the elephants on the right section and the donkeys in the other on the left side. At the center for the exhibit would a building representing the Libertarian party, which also functions as the barn.

The elephant exhibit would inevitably be the bigger of the enclosures, around 9 hectares, being able to hold around seven individuals. It would be divided into an enclosure for males, another one for females and calves, and one for off-show individuals. Each individual would be named after a prominent republican, either in the state, or a general theme (thus, you get bulls named Abraham, George, and Donald, and cows named Sarah, Melania, and Carly)

The donkey exhibit, meanwhile, would be smaller at around 3.2 hectares; both somali wild asses and domestic donkey breeds of North America, such as the American Mammoth, would share it. Of course, they wouldn't be allowed to breed. Instead, the domestic donkeys would be leased from farmers in the area. Like with the elephants, each individual would be named after a prominent republican, either in the state, or a general theme (thus, jacks are named Andrew, Barack, Bill, and Lyndon, and jennies are Hillary, Michelle, Alexandria, and Tammy).

In the central building towards the front would be indoor and outdoor exhibits for porcupines (both North American and African Crested) and Bald eagles, the symbols for the Libertarian party. Outside would be an amphitheater where training sessions for both the elephants and donkeys.

Along the path's circumference and in the building would be interpretives detailing how the elephant and donkey (and the porcupine) became the symbol of their respective party through political cartoons and the press, as well as what traits in elephants and donkeys led them to being chosen. To a lesser extent the evolutionary and cultural history of elephants and equids in North America would also be emphasized, complete with a dig site. Throughout the exhibit would be memorabilia from various campaigns throughout history, both local and national, such as buttons, hats, and posters.

Notes:

• The zoo would not lease its elephants in any way at Republican events or campaign rallies, though it would for donkeys for the Democrats.
• Security would be higher in the exhibit then the rest of the zoo, due to the inherently divisive theme of it.

 

Like river safari,singapore?

 

A large multi-hectare enclosure for mustangs, themed around the debate over whether they qualify as invasive species and thus be eliminated or not. A path would go around 69% of the exhibit's circumference. On the left side would be interpretives for letting mustangs stay, and other would have against the horses living in North America.

 

An exhibit for any sort of carnivoran, lets say african lions or amur tigers, bordering a paddock for hoofstock they would prey on, e.g. zebras or red deer. Connecting the two would be a corridor that would snake through the hoofstock enclosure, allowing the cats to get within centimetres of them for more natural stimulation.

 

^Potentially very stressful for the allocated herbivore though. The Highland Wildlife Park does something similar, the markhor and snow leopards are separated by a "buffer" paddock, but once every week or so they allow the markhor into the snow leopard exhibit (with the cats locked out of course, though they can still see them). Then when the markhor go back into their enclosure the snow leopards can follow around all the scents they left behind

With regards to the vulture funeral thing though, isn't that something you can do already? I read it in a book years ago about the concept of "vulture restaurants" that are actually in the wild (where it would be a little more beneficial I think), but now that I think about it it was probably just livestock, but I remember reading it and thinking "Yeah, that's where I want my body to go." I was a very environmentally conscious 5 year-old!

 

In second grade, my teacher gave us the assignment to write something cool that could happen to us in the forest. I wrote: "If you die in the forest, you get eaten by a Turkey Vulture". Sounded pretty good to me. My teacher didn't like it, though.