This is a great thread, but can it be moved to the Brazil sub-forum? It’s much easier to find such threads later on, if one is planning to travel to Brazil, for example, and is looking for zoo reviews (as I often do)
Thank you for the suggestion, @zoo_enthuasiast. If you're correct someone from the staff may move it, right?
São Paulo Aquarium (Aquário de São Paulo): Located in São Paulo (my city), it is one of the largest aquariums in Latin America. I visited this place a lot, even in school trips. Last year, the São Paulo Aquarium has made a reform, bringing various animals that weren't kept in captivity in Brazil or pretty unusual here, including red kangaroos, red-necked wallabies, meerkats, mantled guerezas, ring-tailed lemurs, harbour seals, south american sea lions and, finally, echidnas, wombats, koalas, polar bears and south american fur seals. As the São Paulo Aquarium in the begin was just focused on fishes & other "indoor" animals, the guests view most of the animals indoor and through glasses. Before the reform, the São Paulo Aquarium was already one of the best aquariums of Latin America and exhibited species like magellanic penguin, amazonian manatee (kept in a large tank with big groups of arapaimas, red-tailed catfishes and pacus), linnaeu's two-toed sloth, large flying fox, south american fur seal (I guess that they got substituted by the three harbour seals), southern tamandua, neotropical otter, arrau river turtle, geoffroy's sideneck turtle and, of course, a variety of fishes including spotted sorubim, brycon, electric eel, atlantic tarpon, atlantic goliath grouper, southern stingary, sand tiger shark, nurse shark...
I think because the Amazon region receives quite a lot of conservation attention already , far more than biomes such as the Cerrado , Caatinga and the Mata Atlantica (Atlantic rainforest) which are sort of overshadowed by the emphasis on Amazonia (Both in ex-situ conservation zoo's and in general with in-situ conservation). Personally , I think it is a very wise decision and I commend them for making that shift in focus. I really hope that other zoological institutions in Southern and South-Eastern Brazil begin to follow suit.
I like the aquarium (despite its ridiculously expensive entrance fee ) but I feel quite uneasy ethically about the polar bear that they have there , it seems so unnecessary.
I love aquariums too on an aesthetic level but to be totally honest with you I am not at all impressed by the Sao Paulo aquarium (my opinion of them has changed drastically since I wrote the comment above) as an institution on so many levels. I'll explain why. After interacting with some of the people in charge there I feel that it has a very commercial mindset and that conservation is not really a priority there but more a meaningless buzz word used to justify their existence (like a great many mediocre zoos). I think the price charged for people to enter the aquarium is a total rip off and also the aesthetics of the place in the way that they display their animals is more than a bit cheesy / tacky / tasteless in my opinion. Moreover, some of the sheer unwarranted arrogance that I have seen displayed by some of the staff (both administrative and otherwise) does not inspire any confidence in me or respect for this place in terms of it's institutional core values / organizational culture whatsoever. Finally the exhibition of polar bears (apparently these were "rescued" from a Russian zoo in Siberia) just leaves me feeling more than a little uncomfortable. Frankly I do not believe that their motives in bringing these bears to Brazil were in any way influenced by concerns for these animals "welfare" in Russia. I just think that this was merely a canny / shrewd business move in order to attract more visitors and generate more cash and I think this is quite a contemptible / cynical strategy.
I suppose I'd have to agree with most of that. Definitely never had a conservation-focused approach even when they used to be less show-offish (e.g., they'd rescue and exhibit individuals such as the manatee Tapajós and the blind fur seal, but I've never heard about them trying to obtain mates for the already-held species), which is easy to notice when compared to entities such as Projeto Tamar. At best I'd say they exceed significantly more at education for the average public (not that it's an unusual or necessarily bad thing, as in How to Exhibit a Bullfrog). As for the polar bears, I wonder at which point (if at any) the ex-situ keeping in locations without the appropriate natural temperature is worth it. The expenses to build and mantain an enclosure way poorer than something like Detroit Zoo's becomes huge.
Yes , I totally agree with most of what you've written here. However, I'm not even very impressed with their environmental education programes. I know that they continually like to emphasize on social media about how much effort they put into educating the public but I'm not really convinced that they are doing a good job of this. I think they just keep talking a lot of bull ****. In essence, sure they talk the talk, but do they really walk the walk when it comes to these things ? or is it all just words and hollow platitudes? I think that there are several other zoos such as Sao Paulo , Sorocaba or Bauru (and even institutions like Butantan) that perform a much better job in this regard and with much less resources at their disposal (with the exception of Sao Paulo zoo) than the aquarium has.
I just took a look at the website of São Paulo Aquarium after reading about it above and its English site looks very professional. The star species of the Aquarium to me would be the Amazonian manatee, as I have never seen it. I would never expected such an Australian collection with echidnas, koalas and wombats in Brazil (but I might be prejudiced in that), but an aquarium seems an odd place anyway to keep these species. The strangest thing I saw on the website however, is that there is a Russian version! I would expect a Spanish (which there isn't) and maybe English version next to Portuguese, but not Russian... What about the polar bears? Is keeping them in the tropics a problem or something else?
Yes, they have quite a strong presence online and on social media. The keeping of Australian (or Papua New Guinean in the case of the Echidna as that is where it was imported from) mammals is a bit weird I agree but I dont know why they are kept there other than they are exotic animals that probably attract visitors. I seem to remember seeing a comment from an Australian Zoochatter involved with zoos over there who helped the aquarium to legally obtain / import these species into Brazil so he / she might be able to tell more. I think in his comment he wrote that he was disappointed by aspects of the conduct by the aquarium. Regarding the Russian on their website , yes, that is also kind of strange and I can't explain that either. As you've mentioned it would make much more sense to have translated pages in Spanish, English and perhaps French as these would be the other second languages commonly spoken here in Brazil. I know that several animals kept by the zoo (polar bears, colobus monkeys, ring tailed lemurs) originally were obtained from Russian zoos but that is still quite an odd reason to have a page in the Russian language.
According to the aquarium's website, the monkeys came from Germany and the lemurs came from an uknown zoo.
Sorry for accidentally hiding another detail about the lemurs. I forgot to say that the uknown zoo they came from is/was located in Europe.
I would like to know too. I've been there in 2018, so I'd like to receive new informations about the place. Looks like some renovation proccesses took place since then.
Really? I hope they add new animals (mainly native to South America) to the collection and move others such as the siamangs. I believe that if they move the siamangs, the apes would most likely be moved to the São Paulo zoo, so that they can stay with Sansão.
They are kept in a completely indoor exhibit with climatization system, so it's not actually a problem. Agree with what you mean here. We can notice for their population plan that they are really focused on profit, and are constantly obtaining exotic species, and the way they deal with it is not great, in my opinion... I also totally agree that most of their exhibits have a cheesy look, (although I can't say they are actually bad, at least for most of the animal welfare aspects) and many areas look a bit like a well structured playground instead of an immersive experience.
Another thing I hope they do is changing their exhibits. I'd like to see a modernization of the institution. Their primate islands aren't that good and the siamangs might be very stressed because of the baboons.
