Mixed vertebrate and invertebrate displays

DesertRhino150

DesertRhino150

Well-Known Member
15+ year member
I admit to being curious about mixed-species displays that contain both vertebrates and invertebrates in zoos. I've been looking around and read of several examples, although I'm not sure how many remain in existence.

- Pygmy loris and Asian horned beetle Xylotrupes gideon sumatraensis at Poznan Zoo. Apparently, this mix was very successful with the beetles more active in the nocturnal house exhibit and the lorises also more active than they were previously:
International Zoo News Vol. 47/8 (No. 305)

- Reticulated python and common crow butterfly Euploea core mixed at Chester Zoo

- A comment below this blog post by Frank Indiviglio states that he kept around 100 whirligig beetles mixed into a large zoo exhibit housing snakes and water turtles. I cannot find anymore details on this:
Something New for Insect-Keepers - The Aquatic Sunburst and Green Diving Beetles - Part 2

- I'm not sure if I've misinterpreted this, but the December 2017 animal transactions for LA Zoo says that mangrove crabs will be exhibited in the Asian mangrove viper display. I'm not sure whether that means they will be displayed together or if the crabs are replacing the viper.
http://www.lazoo.org/wp-new/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Animal-Transactions-12.2017.pdf

Does anyone else know of any other examples?

For the purposes of this, I am not thinking in terms of butterfly walkthroughs containing birds or other animals or reef tanks with live corals and other invertebrates with the fish.
 
Randers Regnskov has giant African land snails free-ranging in their Africa dome together with various African mammal and bird species. Not a completely peaceful mix as individuals are regularly eaten by the hedgehogs and lemurs. This is entirely on purpose, however - they've found a balance where the snails breed fast enough to have a self-sustaining population within the dome, but not so fast that they "take over" the dome and become pests to the plants and guests.

There are also tons of cave crickets in the same dome, but unlike the snails these rarely show themselves to the guests, except for in the cave area of the dome where you can sometimes see pairs of antennae popping out from crevices. The cricket population is similarly self-sustaining, but regularly thinned out by the mammals and birds.
 
land hermit crabs and mountain chicken frogs at Chester. Some butterlfy houses keep lizards and/or birds with the butterflies. Twycross has butterflies and a victoria Crowned Pigeon. Bristol has butterflies and a dove species (can't remember which)
 
The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago has a walk-through butterfly house, that, in addition to butterflies has various Neotropical birds (Red-Legged Honeycreeper, Violaceous Euphonia, ect.) various waxbills, and Red-Eared Sliders.
 
Nephila giant orb-web spiders are with puff adders in Basel, and with crocodiles in Berlin (latter rather stretching the concept - they are on top floor of a huge greenhouse full of vegetation).

Fiddler crabs Uca I saw mixed with mudskippers and mangrove fish in several institutions.

Mangrove hall in Burgers allegedly has upside-down jellyfish and fiddler crabs in isolated pools together with free-flying butterflies and birds and manatees in another pool. I did not see this exhibit yet.

There are not very many other invertebrates which would be suitable. Any mixed exhibit with giant millipedes or stick insects? Any leaf-cutting ant colony in open tropical house? Any bat cave with cave crickets or cockroaches?
 
The commonest examples involve the use of snails and/or shrimps in aquaria; I particularly like the combination of algae-eating 'Amano' shrimps with tentacled snakes in the Monsoon Forest at Chester. A couple of marine aquarium examples from Chester which fall short of full 'reef' tanks are upside-down jellyfish and dwarf mudskippers and my favourite combination of Banggai cardinals with long-spined sea urchins, where you could sometimes see newly-released cardinal fry sheltering among the urchin spines as they would in the wild.

These cardinals have been moved into a new tank recently and I'm not sure if there are any urchins in their tank at the moment.
 
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bongorob said:
Bristol has butterflies and a dove species (can't remember which)
Click to expand...
Bristol had Black-naped Fruit Dove in the Butterfly house when I last visited in March.
Another example of mixed invertebrate and vertebrates would be the Madagascan Blue Walking Stick Insect and Tomato Frog exhibit in the Tropical Realm at Chester.
 
I was going to reply about the many exhibits at Chester but some people appear to have beat me to it :P

The Madgascan blue walking stick insects were however once exhibited with blue-legged mantella but I'm pretty sure that may have really only been an invertabrate exhibit....
 
Some excellent examples - thank you all!

I have been looking recently at the idea behind bioactive substrates - essentially its terminology from the private herptile-keeping hobby that describes an animal enclosure (planted with live plants) where the substrate is seeded with a variety of detritivorous invertebrates such as springtails, woodlice, worms, millipedes, cockroaches, beetle grubs etc. that help with cleaning up animal and plant waste, aerating the soil to keep plants healthy and providing food for the larger enclosure inhabitants. It seems that while it started off in tropical setups it has now spread to temperate and arid displays.

I'm wondering if any zoos have started using bioactive substrates in their displays? While it is used currently just for reptiles, amphibians and some larger invertebrates I imagine some smaller mammals inhabiting indoor enclosures might benefit from it too - watching how tamarins and marmosets hunt for invertebrates in planted outdoor enclosures for instance makes me think that they would benefit from such an exhibit.
 
I'd imagine that many zoo exhibits end up with bioactive substrates, intentionally or otherwise...
 
Another example that I have recently found - if my understanding is correct, Zlin in the Czech Republic keeps African pygmy kingfishers in a mixed exhibit with two species of terrestrial crab (the coconut crab Birgus latro and halloween crab Gecarcinus quadratus are both listed in the article, so I imagine they are the species in question).

Included below is a link to the Zoolex article about the entire display, which includes photos of the kingfisher and crab exhibit:
ZooLex Exhibit
 
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