Speculative Zoo Design and Planning Resources Thread

Ok so I tried PowerPoint yesterday and the tool that the guide used seems to have been either removed or moved and I couldn't find it, so I'm just using LibreOffice Draw to draw the map

 

What would be a good number of animals for a zoo?

 

It depends of the species.
Of course you can imagine thousands of fishes in one zoo, but not thousands of elephants.

 

Like, what about a 115-acre zoo/aquarium mix?

 

You can imagine 5.000 to 10.000 fishes in the aquarium, and 2.000 to 3.000 other animals (I don't count the insects, especially the most social species : ants, bees, termites...).

 

When you say animals, do you mean individual animals, or individual species?

 

Here’s a thread with more information about number of species which all pretty much comes down to size of the zoo. Number of animals would obviously depend on number of species and the number of gregarious species.

"Ideal" number of species in a zoo

This all depends on whether you’re using most of the space for smaller species or if you have many megafauna species which would require a lot more space meaning there’s less room for other species.

 

I'm presuming this is a typo? There's no list of any sort on the map itself as far as I can tell.

 

Yes. Should be: World Species : Ecoregions

 

Is there any threads about animal social groups?

 

You realize you can just search it up instead of posting and waiting for someone else to do the work for you, right? That's why there is a search tool on the top right if you hadn't noticed. People don't need or have to hand things to you all the time...

Anyway, what exactly do you mean here? Are you asking about animals being solitary or gregarious? If so, I don't think there is a thread for that on ZC but it's very easy to find that type of information online, especially for mammals. Wikipedia, for example, does a decent job of indicating whether animals are solitary or live in groups and that sort of thing for most species. Wikipedia and a few other miscellaneous websites are what I've been using so far for my speculative zoo.

 

I'm referring to if animals should be in a group, should they be kept in pairs, or if they can be kept in single-sex groups.

 

In that case, like I said, most of that can be found online. If you search up the name of the species and add "social groupings" or something along those lines at the end of it, you should be able to find a good amount of information for most species.

 

In fact @LionTamarin (and yes I know I'm butting into a thread that I'm not interested in whatsoever as the Speculative zoo design and planning forum I respectfully don't have a major interest in, neither did my earlier fantasy zoo outings tbh), you can usually find most of this information that members keep giving multiple sources on, just by doing a google search.
For example, casually, I'm going to search up what is the normal amount of Little blue penguins in a group, and I found this little tidbit of information:


A lot of your questions have simple answers, so try to use the sources that are near you for basic ideas on animal Info in general.
Now of course, use all the other more speculative zoo designing and resources that were aforementioned prior to this post, but just for general animal info like, "What do Chiru eat?", then you can find a simple answer.

 

This is exactly the sort of question I asked people to avoid. It is very easy to find the answer to this question, both in multiple resources provided in this thread or on the internet in general. To reiterate what other younger members have already said, please use resources first and then ask the question if you can't find an answer. There is a tremendous amount of information on Zoochat alone, besides the multitude of resources posted so far in this thread.

 

This is more complicated than just looking up online how the animals live in the wild. For example, many ruminants live in the wild in large herds with multiple males, but a key factor is that the herd is spread out over a large area, giving the males the ability to flee from each other and thus to avoid conflicts that could otherwise be dangerous. This isn't always possible in a zoo, depending on the intra-species flight distance and the size of the enclosure, so a species that exists in the wild with multiple males in a herd might have only one male in a zoo group to avoid fatal conflicts. (With some species, you can manage to have two males if there is a dense copse or a hill in the enclosure of sufficient size and strategically placed, which enables the less dominant male to get out of the sight of the dominant male.) All of this is also true for many species of primates. This requires more in-depth research to find the experience with a particular species in captivity, which isn't always easy.

I can tell you from my own experience that for species that exist in the wild in groups with more than one of both sexes, it can in fact be very difficult or impossible to find out what's considered the appropriate or ideal group size and sex ratio for a group in captivity. For my fantasy zoo, I basically had to make educated guesses for species that include reindeer/caribou, wolves, rabbits and hares, many rodents, shrews, sea otters, dolphins and porpoises, and many species of bats. (Indeed, the mating system and wild sex ratios are utterly unknown to science for the vast majority of bat species and at best poorly known for many rodents and shrews.) Bears in the wild are solitary except for brief breeding encounters and situations like salmon runs or shore assemblages of Polar Bears when there is no pack ice but there has been good success housing bears in captivity in single sex groups of 2 or 3. The latter makes for a more interesting exhibit, but is it "natural"? At least some, if not most, fox species are solitary for part of the year but come together as pairs for the breeding season and to raise the kits, and sometimes for even more than that. So what do you do in a zoo? It's simplest to exhibit them as pairs year round, which will generally work.

It is considerably easier to get the wild information for birds on-line than for mammals, and there is tremendous detail about how they live in the wild in birdsoftheworld.org. Most birds of course live in the wild as pairs and the information on typical/average nest-to-nest difference will tell you whether in captivity you can house more than one pair in the space you have available. But there are lots of questions to which you can't find the answers, like what's a good size and sex ratio for a captive group of tinamous or rheas?

There is also a dearth of information on line for most species of reptiles and amphibians. I basically just decided on a rule of thumb to display (a) most reptiles in pairs, and (b) most amphibians in groups of 2.2 since for the latter the presence of more than one male is often tied to reproductive success. Exceptions are made of course for species that are known to be aggressively territorial or for unique situations like the Helmeted Water Toad where the females are much larger than the males and will eat them.

 

Does anyone know of any good resources to check the safety, suitability and toxicity of plant species, for those of us who might want to mention or include some plant species in our designs?

I have done it a few times before, but it only recently occurred to me that I never really checked out the safety aspect, and wondered whether such information would even be available.

 

I apologise if this question is not correct for this thread.

I am currently struggling a bit. I really want to continue making exhibits, but I struggle with knowing how exactly to go about it. It is mainly the researching stage I struggle with, as the designing is often easier for me. But as I want to make my exhibits more realistic and detailed, there's also a steep learning curve for me in regards to researching the area/species I want in my complex.

Does anyone have any tips (or preferably a step-by-step guide) as to how to complete the research for a complex before designing it?

 

I know of a great thread right here : Speculative Zoo Design and Planning Resources Thread

 

That's not what i'm asking. I have the resources, i'm just a bit overwhelmed, so i'm asking how to research efficiently (e.g. what to research first in a complex, how to not get overwhelmed etc.). In essence, how to use them efficiently.