CGSwans flies north for the winter

Well of course..if youre going to be pedantic.The fact remains that I could go in my garden this afternoon and put a hundred species of invert in jars - but that wouldnt make me a zoo would it? There`s an age old understanding of "comprehensive" with regard to zoos and its basically vertebrates. Its the desire to show a wide spectrum of animals...but one that possibly does not include single-cell protozoans in its remit.

 

I'm aware of said age-old understanding and it's a bias that persists in pretty much every area of life. That doesn't make it right. Whether we want our major zoos to accurately represent taxonomic diversity is perhaps a discussion for another day, but let's not pretend they do when they quite clearly don't.

Oh, and to continue the pedantry, protists aren't animals (and necessarily unicellular ), so I wouldn't consider them within a zoo's remit either. If you opened your invert collection to the public, however, it would absolutely constitute a zoo. If I recall, your own publications have followed this definition as well.

 

Well of course..but isnt this all getting a bit contorted? Along the lines of "how can they call it football when the goalie handles it?"Point is that Moscow chooses to have a large collection purely by the now old-fashioned policy of a wide brief rather than a more"politically correct" policy..and personally i find it makes rather a nice change instead of committee-derived homogeny.

 

This is an experience that can be replicated at the annual Zoohistorica event, when euro-zoonerds gather in profusion.....

 

No, it would be more akin to "how can they call it a handball team?" when there was one goalie and 10,000 people kicking the ball. If the goalie were paid a million or so times more than the rest of the players combined because it was "handball" rather than "football", you might start to think critics of the hand bias were more than pedants.

 

Apologies for the writing delay, hasn't been the easiest of weeks but getting back on track now.

Zoo #34, Moskvarium, 8/7/2017

If Moscow Zoo was Planet Nine (turned Pluto), then Moskvarium is Planet Ten, a hypothetical entity for which only scant evidence exists. For a major aquarium - one of Europe's biggest, and no pipsqueak on a global scale either - there's remarkably little about this place here on Zoochat or elsewhere on the internet. This won't be a long post, because I've been struggling with illness and do-morbid apathy for much of the past week, and so my thoughts are already a bit stale.

The other thing that's unusual about Moskvarium, aside from its relative anonymity, is that it's out in the middle of nowhere. It's on the site of a world fair that was held during the Soviet era, and which is now undergoing one of those fitful attempts at urban renewal, into a recreational precinct, that so often seem to involve aquaria. Many of the pavilions from the expo are being restored, and other attractions in the precinct include a replica space shuttle and, because this is Russia, there are the inevitable MiG, an attack helicopter and a ballistic missile on display too. To give an idea of how out of the way they have plonked a mega-aquarium, it's an almost 2km walk from the nearest metro station: almost unheard of for Moscow, which has one of the best public transport networks in the world.

The big attractions here are the cetaceans - they have orcas, at least one beluga and some dolphins - and there is a seperate ticket for the orca show. Admission to the aquarium itself is 1000 rubles (about $A23 for me I think), but I visited on a Saturday evening and it's cheaper during the week. A ticket to the orca show *starts* at 1500 rubles and climbs all the way to 5000 for a seat directly in front of the pool, in what I assume would be the splash zone. I wasn't going to pay that much for a circus act so stuck to the aquarium bit, and I was still able to see the cetaceans, albeit only through small windows into their pools. The orca space seemed decent, as these things go, although it's very hard to judge the size of big water tanks without a top-down view. I saw three orcas, one beluga and two dolphins: the beluga and dolphins were in the same pool, but were separated by ugly wire mesh, like a shark barrier surrounding a beach.

Aside from the cetaceans, the rest of the aquarium stretches out in a big horseshoe shape. It boasts of having 80 exhibits: there's only 79 marked on maps but there's an unmarked, very 'modern upscale hotel lobby' style pool for koi at the start of the tour that doesn't appear on the map. That aesthetic doesn't quite follow into the main display corridor, which I think reaches for post-industrial chic but falls just short, and lands on 'TV sci-fi set', instead. If you have ever seen Stargate, imagine that the endless grey corridors on board the ships are wider, and there are windows with fish in them.

That number of exhibits is padded out with quite a few tanks for pet shop fish - for fighting fish, for neon tetras, for discus and so on - and most of the exhibits are your stock standard aquarium ensemble. There's a number of exhibits at the start that feature Russian habitats (labelled on maps as the Japan, White and Black seas and 'small rivers of Russia'), but they're small and mostly, I think, a missed opportunity. Unfortunately I'm not somebody who can give advice on whether it's a go-to destination for species hunters, but some cool species I noticed that I wasn't familiar with were humpback turretfish, zebra catfish and fire eels.

One big advantage of this place - and probably, by extension, of its out of the way location with plenty of room - is that the layout is remarkably spacious. At a guess there would have been in the high hundreds of people in the aquarium section when I was there, but it wasn't crowded. The corridors are wide and, best of all, although there are two big tunnel tanks (one freshwater, one tropical marine sharks), neither are bottlenecks like they so often are in smaller aquaria. Both tunnels serve as side corridors to the main route through the aquarium: you're only going through there to see that tank (also viewable from full-size, side-on windows), not to get from one exhibit to another. It makes an enormous, defining difference to the experience here, and that lack of crowding is one reason why I'm putting it ahead of Genoa as Europe's third best aquarium (that I've visited), even if the outright quality of Lisbon or Valencia isn't quite there.

That's pretty much it, really. There's something I think I've forgotten, though. What was... oh yeah. The last exhibit on the horseshoe. About eight Baikal seals, zipping back and forth like beer kegs with flippers. Not sure if they'd be of interest to anyone though.

 

Someone from the UK is going to be pretty green with envy due to your last paragraph...

 

How did you know I was talking about you? And are you now saying Moscow isn't in Europe?

 

Pedantic to the end!

 

Zoo #35: Leningrad Zoo, 16/07/2017

I only decided to visit this one during my last afternoon in Russia. I had planned to skip it, knowing it to be of less than great repute, and conscious that I might not have been getting quite as much out of my zoo visits of late as I might hope. I was only eventually tempted in by the prospect of netting a few passerines, and by not having anything better to do.

I’ve always wondered why they kept the Soviet-era name when the city itself returned to being Saint Petersburg. Does anybody know? Anyway, it seems appropriate because unfortunately some important chunks of this zoo remain in the Stalinist era. All zoos have their weaker links – even Zurich has its ape house - but the gulf in quality between Leningrad’s best and worst is enormous, and not, as in Zurich’s case, because it has anything outstanding among its best.

I’m talking, of course, about Leningrad’s cat house. This is an abomination. A series of dark, featureless concrete cells – yes, cells, the pejorative is deliberate – that are barely wide enough for the cats to take two strides as they pace back and forth. A trio of lions, two jaguars, a snow leopard and two pumas exist – one can scarcely call it living - in this monstrosity, along with I think a serval and some raccoons. It might just be adequate for the latter two, with some enrichment work. But for the cats it is the very worst thing I have seen anywhere in Europe. I don’t know whether Leningrad is EAZA-accredited but while ever that building remains in use it shouldn’t be.

Sorry. Needed to get that off my chest. Things aren’t a great deal better for the ungulates here. Several species- such as the camels – have nothing to stand on but concrete, and scarce little of that. Thankfully, apart from the tiny, inadequate housing for ungulates and big carnivores (plus some smaller ones, like a brown-nosed coati in a cupboard barely a meter wide, and a raccoon dog in something that looks like a child’s cubby house), the rest of the zoo is of a much higher standard. Which is a bit like using Donald Trump as a measuring stick for world leaders: it sets a bar so low it would be impossible not to clear it.

Which isn’t to say that the remaining exhibits here are only slightly less terrible. They’re not: the primate collection is kept in appropriate, even borderline attractive, exhibits. The indoor quarters are even more important than usual here, given Saint Petersburg’s climate, and so I was thrilled to see spacious enclosures with organic features. Importantly, Leningrad doesn’t keep any big primates that they would be unable to provide for: no great apes and no baboons.

One of the zoo’s two entrances – the one I used – enters straight into the reptile and aquarium building: the reptiles are really quite good, with spacious, often quite impressively decorated terraria. The zoo has lots of chameleons, particularly panther chameleons, and I enjoyed watching several of these most outré of lizards as they prowled in search of food (out of luck: they hadn’t yet been fed). Panther chameleons might just be the prettiest of the species commonly kept in captivity. The aquarium section is small, but has some nice tanks. They are nearly all variations on the coral reef theme, and even I – an aficionado for a well-done reef tank – felt that they could try to diversify it a bit.

The bird collection is mostly held in acceptable, if unremarkable, aviaries. A number of parrots, as well as toucans and other tropical species, live in entirely indoor accommodation in the reptile house, but where the birds are outside they do pretty well. As mentioned I picked up a few passerines that I think I would have limited opportunities to find elsewhere.

That’s it in a nutshell. It’s only a small zoo – well under 10 hectares – but it doesn’t use its space well. There’s lots of spaces that are either for kid’s attractions or simply open space, and that’s hard to cop when your lions are living in something out of a Charles Dickens novel. To its credit, the zoo keeps multiple enclosures for a lot of its species: multiple groups of yellow mongoose, of raccoons, of Pére David’s deer and so on. To its discredit, it is too seldom able to do it adequately. To its credit, there are bits and pieces of construction work going on here or there. To its discredit, even some very recent, unfinished work comes from the ‘maximum security solitary confinement’ school of aesthetics: I was astonished to see some new outdoor exhibits, almost finished, that appear to be for the currently under renovation South American house. They had fully tiled floors. Why on earth?

This is not a good zoo, and unlike, say, Bratislava or Sofia there is not really scope for drastic improvement: it has already pared back its roster of big mammal species, in recognition of its space constraints, but still it hasn’t achieved adequate conditions for many of its animals. Perhaps Saint Petersburg – the city – might benefit from starting its zoo over somewhere on the outskirts of town.

 

I think this has been precisely the plan for a number of years, with an enormous amount of time and effort going into planning just such a development, leaving the current city-centre location clear to be redeveloped. Unfortunately, things haven't moved as they might have done and, as a consequence, the zoo remains in poor shape.

 

Zoo #36: Helsinki Zoo, 19/7/2017

This one might have fallen into the 'because it's there' category - a category that I've not entirely discarded but have certainly cut back on at this stage - but for one thing. It's on an island. I have an inexplicable - or at least unexplained - love of islands and of boats. Give me a zoo on an island and a boat to get me there, and I'm in.

I'd missed out on a zoo I'd planned to visit in these parts, by the way. I came from Saint Petersburg to Helsinki by way of Tallinn, but my zoo plans there were taken away from me by a bus that simply didn't show up back in Kraków: I was forced to spend an extra night there, delaying my departure from the wretched Schengen visa zone. To keep within my 90 day allowance I had to add a day to Saint Petersburg at Tallinn's expense: with only a day and a half in Tallinn, and with the zoo quite a way out of town, I decided it would be the thing to give way. I have missed out on a great many goats.

Anyway, Helsinki. As you may have gathered, I took the boat there. I got the boat out from Kauppatori, but after finishing took the other elite, across to Hakaniemi, which had a vaguely affordable vegetarian restaurant. The Kauppatori route is longer and much more picturesque, and just as no visit to Taronga Zoo is complete without catching the ferry from Circular Quay, I reckon the ferry is an essential part of the Helsinki Zoo experience. And it only costs €7 return: maybe €2 more than the bus did. Surprisingly good value in a city that might as well simply take custody of your credit card upon arrival.

The zoo itself is fair-to-middlin'. Being barely 800km from the Arctic circle it bows to reality, and the only species here that aren't cold-adapted are those in the two tropical houses. Most of the big ABCs are out: no elephants, no apes, no African hoofstock. The big names are limited to Amur Leopards and the Oh, My! Trio (a good name for a blues band, perhaps?), though wolves, harbour seals and penguins all seem like obvious oversights. In fact, now that I think about it, Helsinki's unique location could set it up to give the latter two species among the best exhibits in the world: they could have sea pens!

What the zoo does do, it mostly does adequately and sometimes very well, with some notable exceptions. The two snow leopard exhibits take full advantage of the rocky, sloping terrain, and one of the cats was busily patrolling and watching the reindeer opposite: I could almost hear its brain ticking over as it tried to think of some way it hasn't yet identified to go out there and grab one. The combination of an attractive exhibit and an active cat made for, I think, my best ever experience with this species.

The rest of the cat exhibits - aside from the sizeable one for Asiatic lions (or lion: I only spotted one male) - were fairly average, mostly because they were on the small size. Though Helsinki's (many) Amur leopards are no more ripped off than leopards are practically everywhere, to be fair. The 'bear castle' is a great size and a reasonable habitat: the 'monkey castle' for Barbary macaques is ugly but functional.

Of the three indoor exhibit complexes one is wonderful - the Borealalia(?) house, with its couple of terraria that are the equal of anywhere - and two - the Amazon and Afro-Asian houses - are disappointing. The Amazon one is full of ugly, artless indoor enclosures, but it has a beautiful soft coral reef tank that is full of purple - purple corals, purple gorgonians etc. At the same time that I'm increasingly bored with the stock standard aquarium ensemble I'm falling increasingly in love with exhibits that blur the line between art and science, like this one does merely through creative species selection.

The ungulate exhibits are big, which is all one can often say about ungulate exhibits. They really should be something no zoo ever stuffs up: put a fence around as broad a space as you can manage and try to grow some grass. It can't be that hard. Here's looking at you, Leningrad, and you, Moscow.

There's a lot - a lot - of owl aviaries, and every single one is much larger than your average owl aviary and gorgeously planted. I caught myself wishing Helsinki had the climate to use them as mixed-species aviaries instead, but I won't begrudge the owls of Helsinki their good fortune.

I've now covered most of the zoo's exhibits, but none of it captures why I loved this fairly average zoo. It's the setting, of course. I adored walking along the island shore on the zoo's perimeter. I loved scrambling over the rocky outcrops at the top of the island. Even the rain didn't annoy me like it might normally: I was in the wilds of the sub-Arctic, it came with the territory. The sheer joy of the location put me in a whimsical mood. I played hide and seek around a tree trunk with a wild red squirrel. I came across a play area for children with trampolines set into the ground, and stopped to bounce for a minute or two. In short, I just plain enjoyed myself.

 

Zoo #37: The Blue Planet, 25/7/2017

In which I complete my set of Europe's big five aquaria.

I enjoyed my time here, thought I had to overcome a very frustrating start. I've bought a 'Copenhagen card' that gets me into the aquarium, zoo and various other things, in addition to unlimited public transport. I usually look into these things in different cities and conclude they're not worthwhile, but in Copenhagen they actually do stack up.

Except The Blue Planet are idiots with it. Everywhere else I've used it had a QR code reader that could read the card, so I could bypass ticket lines. The Blue Planet don't, so despite having effectively pre-purchased my ticket, I still had to line up. Which meant 30 minutes, much of it out in the rain. I was unimpressed.

Once inside, though, I was impressed. Very impressed. This aquarium doesn't really go in for super rare species (or if it does I didn't notice), and it doesn't have very many big, blow-you-away tanks (though the oceanarium is one of the better ones I've seen). What it does have, however, are some of the most beautifully aquascaped tanks I've ever seen.

The freshwater portion of the 'Northern seas and rivers' exhibit zone (I doubt I've got the name exactly right but it's something like that) is particularly gorgeous, with representations of ponds and different micro habitats within rivers that are like works of art. In one they depicted a branch that had fallen from an overhanging tree into the tank, and they must replace it periodically because the fish had just about eaten away all the leaves. So they've not only displayed an image of a micro-habitat, they've also managed to display a changing, evolving one.

The same quality extends into the coral reef tank. Not the biggest I've seen, but it stretches along one wall for a good 12 metres or so, so it's certainly no pipsqueak of a tank either. It's only narrow, too - perhaps a couple of metres - though they create an illusion of depth with a window into another tank behind it, which houses some large fish such as a red emperor and a leopard shark. But it's a busy, bustling metropolis of a reef, with more than 60 fish species signposted, including some that are very reef-unfriendly such as butterflyfish and big angelfish. I guess there's simply enough corals there that the damage is spread out and doesn't overwhelm any of them.

The coral tank re-fired a somewhat dormant corner of my imagination. Any interest I ever had in owning a zoo and/or aquarium has given way to reality and the desire to pursue other, and more achievable, life goals. But occasionally I go somewhere that gets me dreaming again. I love the idea of building a big - I mean *big* reef tank, something in the tens of thousands of litres, that's big enough to sustain species like the ones I mentioned above, which simply destroy coral in normal-sized systems - and allow it to develop and age over the years. It's a dream - it will almost certainly remain one - but Blue Planet has a display that's very close to what that dream looks like in my mind's eye. I lingered over it for a long time.

There's only a single mammal exhibit, for sea otters, and unfortunately it's the weakest in the entire aquarium. It's outside the main building, in a small terrace that faces the water, but it's only a narrow, fully-covered over pair of concrete pools. There is underwater viewing from inside the building, but it's not at the same standard as the habitat tanks. I was also underwhelmed by the sea bird exhibit that displays fish well enough, but is a small, featureless concrete dorm for puffins, murres, Inca terns and a couple of ducks. On the plus side, whilst out on the terrace for the sea otters I saw a flash of movement among the rocks at the water's edge, and darting down to investigate was astonished to see a wild stoat!

It's those disappointing keystone exhibits, mostly, that pull me back from declaring Copenhagen to be at the same level as Valencia, though it's very close to par with Lisbon. It also suffers from poor planning in parts: there's some narrow corridors that cause traffic jams, which just reinforces for me the value of Valencia's open plan design, and also Moscow's generous, wide corridors. But give Copenhagen's aquascaping to Valencia's layout and you would have the best aquarium you could reasonably ask for.

 

Of the 37 zoological facilities that you have visited, there are by my count 9 of them that are true aquariums. Having just browsed through this entire thread yet again, I would like to make the case that you would rank the aquatic establishments in this order:

#1 - Valencia Oceanografic
#2 - Lisbon Oceanarium
#3 - The Blue Planet Aquarium
#4 - Moskvarium
#5 - Aquarium of Genoa
#6 - Dubai Aquarium + Underwater Zoo
#7 - Haus des Meeres
#8 - Aquario Vasco da Gama
#9 - Dubrovnik Aquarium

Does that sound reasonable? Of course, the top 5 are likely far ahead of the next group.

 

Yes, that's broadly speaking reasonable, though I could be swayed either way on Lisbon v Copenhagen and Genoa v Dubai. There are four great aquaria in Europe, I think, not five.

If Afrykarium and the two other aquatic exhibits at Wroclaw were a standalone aquarium I think that'd sneak into that same 5-7 bracket as Genoa and Dubai.