I have a feeling the reptile species count isn't all that low - and in any case, as you note the lemurs were pretty influential previously, with only 3 species of those!
However I do not believe any exhibit no matter how great can not compare to multiple good exhibits This is more of a personal opinion I meant to say in my eyes the exhibits all look fairly average or even above so
Just for the record: I and others have attempted to engage this request constructively and have at length argued the merits of Zurich in this competition, Masoala aside. Such arguments however, imo, were largely ignored and inundated by a selective focus on Zurich's weakest spots alone, in sum creating, again imo, a rather distorted picture.
It's pointless to think of Masoala as "one exhibit", indeed thinking of it as an "exhibit" in the first place defies what it is and what it does with visitors. It's as close a recreation of a living, breathing ecosystem as I have ever seen.
One could just as easily suggest that some people (not merely in this thread) historically have had a "selective focus on Plzen's weakest spots alone" of course it's worth noting that your above-quoted summary of the Zurich collection came more than 24 hours into the discussion and was the first time anyone posted anything in-depth regarding anything beyond Masoala; equally, no discussion of Zurich's low points took place until after that point. Conversely discussion of Plzen in terms of negative points started pretty much immediately!
Well, not always as I've said, I neither expected not hoped for Plzen to get this far! So it's doing pretty damn well.....
Of course I don't know if @Rayane intended it that way, but the way I understood it was, that whenever is the matchup as close as this one, it is always Plzen on the losing side
I feel like the debate is pretty much always how bad is the bad at Plzen, while no one cares about how good the good is as well. Edit : 442 species/subspecies listed on ZTL for Plzen against 93 in Zürich, come on... And the quality vs quantity isn't so true as Plzen isn't just the Lemur house...
To put it bluntly is that the good enclosures of Plzen don't reach the highest level the other zoos in this competition reach. Compared to other zoos in this final round Plzen has more weak enclosures and very few outstanding ones. Plzen mainly relies on the strength of its collection, which nobody here criticizes. As pointed out before it is pretty impressive they reached the final at all.
Of course, I'm not saying Plzen belongs this far, but for this match up, Zürich - except Masoala - doesn't blow out Plzen quality wise enough to narrow down the 300+ species gap. In my opinion, of course.
Zürich with Masoala does blow out Plzen quality-wise though, so I don't know what your argument is. Should we not count the Masoala hall?
Not sure this is the right translatation for the word condescendant in french, but it's what I found : patronizing. Why being so patronizing ? Still not enough to blow out a 300+ species lead in my opinion.
@Rayane's argument is quite simply that Plzen has such an advantage in species exhibited (4.5 times that of Zurich's), that Masoala's brilliance cannot close this gap. The fact is only a small fraction of Zurich's bird species actually live in Masoala, so surely it cannot be simply used as Zurich's whole argument, especially if Zurich also has poor exhibits in combination. Plzen's collection is supremely impressive and crammed with rarities - no-one can deny that. On the other hand, Masoala is the best indoor rainforest in the world - almost nobody can deny that. This results in a standoff between not only a fantastic collection and fantastic exhibits but also between the other exhibits in Zurich and the quality of exhibitry in Plzen. Apart from Masoala, Zurich only has a handful of exhibits, mostly smallish glass fronted aviaries, including a few let-down ones. On the other hand, Plzen has good exhibitry for all its species save the Barn owl. The fact that a zoo with a comparative shortage of funds has been able to exhibit so many beautiful, unknown rarities in mostly good -> fantastic exhibits highlights the importance of birds in Plzen, whereas when I visited Zurich, I felt birds were not held up in the same light as mammals or herps and hence seemed to have less importance in the context of the zoo as a whole.
This was one of the debates, together with Chester vs Prague, that most of the voters participated in.Seems like we all start missing the Cup, before it even finished...
Good thing my name wasn't uttered a third time; otherwise, who knows what mayhem could have ensued... For the record, it has been common for me to wait until the second or third day to vote; I think people just didn't notice until recently I often don't vote at all, even if I keep up with the discussion or participate. My sole venture into the nebulous and fractured discussion this turned out to be was simply to question an assumption about animal welfare that had yet to be substantiated by evidence. Otherwise, I lost the main thread of this discussion a while back, and will simply say that the close margin seems fair and that even if I had felt compelled to choose a side it would not have been a game-altering 3-0 vote.
Wowie, another close one that came down to one vote or we may have a different result! On another note, @amur leopard got me curious. How much of Zurich's bird collection is actually held in Masoala? Does anyone have a percentage or number to compare with the 93 @Rayane cited Zurich having in total?
