We've had a lot of fairly soft threads created recently that seem purely intended to generate discussion, so here's another one. The game is simple. You have three circles: a 25km diameter, a 50km diameter and a 100km diameter. You can place them anywhere in the world. Where would you drop them to maximise the zoos within? Not just in terms of quantity but also quality. To be clear, the circles are for three separate discussions, rather than to be used in conjunction. I have my own thoughts, but hopefully other people will chime in first. There are no correct answers, but there are probably some wrong ones!
Let's immediately start with the elephant in the room; Singapore of course! If you put the center of the 25km circle somewhere in Bukit Timah nature reserve, you'd easily catch just about all major collections. Singapore Zoo, Singapore Night Safari and Jurong Bird Park are all world class zoos with an amazing variety of species and a generally wonderful atmosphere. River Safari, while a lot smaller than those 3, is also a wonderful park with some interesting species, and S.E.A. Aquarium is a very impressive collection and building as well. Apart from those 5 wonderful, big zoos, there's also a lot of wonderful nature, a lot of wonderful architecture, and some very impressive gardens (Botanical garden, Chinese garden, Garden by the bay...) within the diameter.
The obvious contender for the 100km circle would be the Ruhr Valley; the tricky question is whereabouts to place the centre of the circle given the fact we are talking about a 100km diameter rather than a 100km radius The best I can work out is to centre the circle on Velbert, just south of Essen, which - along with many, many smaller collections - would allow the circle to encompass Wuppertal, Duisburg, Zoom-Gelsenkirchen, Dusseldorf Aquazoo, Krefeld, Dortmund and Koln.
There might be a case for a point near Arnhem (or "capturing" Arnhem), there's a wide variety of high quality Dutch zoos in that area covering a lot of specialties -pretty good safari park (Beekse Bergen), aquatic mammals (Harderwijk), primates (Apenhuel), Giant Pandas (soon) & allegedly Tarsiers (soon) (Rhenen), Burgers itself and a number of interesting little collections. I'm not certain you can get them all in a 50km radius of a centre point but, from experience, I know you can base yourself in this area for a week and see a lot of nice zoos without too much driving effort.
@Vision I had thought you might need the 50km circle for Singapore. It's a little smaller than I guesstimated. But obviously a very strong contender. @Shorts You could also get some overlap with @TeaLovingDave and include at least Duisburg in there as well. Really an amazing density of collections. Are any of the smaller collections truly noteworthy TLD?
The SeaLife at Oberhausen is, from what I recall, said to be one of the better ones; otherwise I think the only other noteworthy collection within the 100km circle surrounding Velbert would be TerraZoo Rheinberg, which contains about a hundred assorted species of reptile and amphibian - including quite a lot of "hot" snake taxa.
Dieren en Uilenpark "de Paay" ( with for example Grisons ) falls also in the 50 kilometer radius from Arnhem .
It's not the point of this thread exactly, but I've come to form the opinion, purely from second-hand accounts and pictures, that the Netherlands must be the greatest 'pound-for-pound' zoo nation. If history had run a different way imagine what we would say about a Greater Holland that incorporated Belgium and western Germany....
Tokyo-yokohama region is also a good contender, With three zoo and one aquarium in Yokohama, and three zoo and five aquarium in tokyo.
Singapore and the Rhine-Ruhr would be my choices as well, but a few other contenders: UAE: a 100km circle around Dubai and Sharjah would encompass Dubai Aquarium, The Lost Chambers Aquarium, Dubai Butterfly Garden, The Green Planet, Dubai Dolphinarium, Arabia's Wildlife Centre, Sharjah Aquarium, Sharjah Butterfly House, the penguin habitat at Ski Dubai, and countless others. By the end of 2017, it should also include Dubai Crocodile Park and Dubai Safari, arguably the most exciting new zoo since Georgia Aquarium opened in 2005. Melbourne: Melbourne Zoo, Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium, Melbourne Museum, Werribee Open Range Zoo, Healesville Sanctuary, and even a Night Safari substitute in Moonlit are all within 100km. Given Healesville's inclusion, I'm tempted to say this entry has the most mouth-watering species line-up. New York: Surely deserves a mention, with the five WCS zoos plus Staten Island. I thought they could all be covered in 25km, but the Bronx and Staten/Coney Island are further apart than I remembered. Still an impressive 50km. Moscow, Sydney, the Bay Area, and Dallas-Fort Worth also spring to mind as places with a high concentration of zoos worth visiting.
