Zoo/Aquarium Hot Takes

ZooBinh said:
Well the most diverse collection in the world can’t consist 99% of partly terrestrial creatures :p…

Now Shedd surely is the most specious, if that’s what you mean. ;)
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It’s not partly terrestrial just say aquatic. Most of their collection is fully aquatic.
 
Considering how animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of environmental destruction-- being the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gasses and the chief reason for deforestation and biodiversity loss-- it's kind of ironic that when one looks at the menu for almost any zoo restaurant/concession in the US, almost every entree will be animal-based. Yeah, I know stuff like hot dogs, chicken tenders, pizza, etc, are crowd pleasers, but still.
 
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Adding onto this, another ironic thing is zoos and aquariums standing against climate change and pollution but also using products such as Coca-Cola, which is one of the worlds worst plastic polluters according to Greenpeace International. I am guilty of being a coke drinker so I am not in any way shaming the coke lovers out there. I love my zoo with my heart, but this doesn’t make sense to me. Yes, I know they need to bring people in somehow, but it still just gives me that weird feeling.
 
evilmonkey239 said:
but considering how animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of environmental destruction-- being the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gasses
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Grain-fed beef is yes - pasture and hay fed do not. Otherwise all the wild bison, buffalo, and other ruminants would be doing significant damage.

Sphenisciologist said:
Adding onto this, another ironic thing is zoos and aquariums standing against climate change and pollution but also using products such as Coca-Cola, which is one of the worlds worst plastic polluters according to Greenpeace International.
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It's give and take - big corporations give donations and even fund exhibits. They're not great in terms of their pollution, but they're funding the zoos. Equally the meat for zoo carnivores has to come from somewhere - aka the agriculture destruction referred to a post earlier. It's a big tangled web of complicated giving and taking.
 
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Great Argus said:
Grain-fed beef is yes - pasture and hay fed do not. Otherwise all the wild bison, buffalo, and other ruminants would be doing significant damage.
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Except if these pastures are created by destroying native forests or healthy grassland ecosystem, as in S-America... One could also argue that in some places cattle pastures take up valuable space that could be used for more space-efficient calories that do no produce loads of methane etc. In some areas livestock keeping is the only sustainable option, as in certain drylands and steppe areas, but often this leads to environmental degradation. The reason why droughts are such a problem in places like Somalia has only partly to do with climate change, but also says a lot about how overgrazing has annihilated the resilience of the ecosystem to any kind of shock (like a drought). This is a somewhat simplified version, but pasture fed is not necessarily good either.
 
Great Argus said:
It's give and take - big corporations give donations and even fund exhibits. They're not great in terms of their pollution, but they're funding the zoos.
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That’s true but in the long term I think it’s more detrimental than it is beneficial. Yes they fund zoos that use Coca-Cola products but I don’t think that’s as good when you compare it to the amount of waste that’s produced annually.
 
MonkeyBat said:
As someone who just came back from the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, the Schute's Family Gallery was not that bad. Was it great? No. But my family loved the exhibit and found it refreshing from other reptile houses.
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noobmaster69 said:
I like zoos having those animatronic dinosaur attractions, provided they are accurate lol or at least don't look straight out of the 60s. Chester Zoo's Predators attraction had some beautiful prehistoric animals
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Agreed, very much a concept that can work so long as it’s done properly. I’d like to contrast this with WMSP’s Land of the Living Dinosaurs, which cost well over a million to build and was the only major development in the latter half of the 2010s, yet was horrifically inaccurate and already feels like it degraded decades ago. The point being that this type of attraction needs to have actual effort put into it.
 
@noobmaster69 & @Paleoarchontas : The disadvantages of such models are that they are expensive, pretty soon outdated (I'm looking at you, Spinosaurus), high maintenance (at least the animatronic ones) and take away space that might be used better for the real live zoo animals.

And is it just me or are the Smilodon and the dire wolf having a bad hair day? ;) :p
 
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noobmaster69 said:
I like zoos having those animatronic dinosaur attractions, provided they are accurate lol or at least don't look straight out of the 60s. Chester Zoo's Predators attraction had some beautiful prehistoric animals
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Bronx zoo's dinosaur safari is also quite accurate outside of the spinosaurus(which always seems to be changing) and the Trex
 
The San diego zoo is overrated. 99% of people say it's the best zoo in the entire world yet the majority of those people have never even been to the San Diego Zoo. Yes the collection is fantastic, but most of the enclosures are just average.
 
Pleistocene891 said:
The San diego zoo is overrated. 99% of people say it's the best zoo in the entire world yet the majority of those people have never even been to the San Diego Zoo. Yes the collection is fantastic, but most of the enclosures are just average.
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I wouldn't call them average when you can place almost every exhibit into any other zoo and it would be considered one of the best of it's kind in the US but when they are all together I think they lose a bit of their specialness.
 
Echobeast said:
I wouldn't call them average when you can place almost every exhibit into any other zoo and it would be considered one of the best of it's kind in the US but when they are all together I think they lose a bit of their specialness.
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Yeah their bird and primate exhibits are good for the most part, but their hoofstock, feline, bear, and pachyderm exhibits are average to below average. The urban jungle is one of the worst exhibit complexes I’ve ever seen. And the 2nd part of the Asian passage is full of tiny grottos that look like they’re part of the 60s.
 
Pleistocene891 said:
The urban jungle is one of the worst exhibit complexes I’ve ever seen. And the 2nd part of the Asian passage is full of tiny grottos that look like they’re part of the 60s.
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Two of the last places in need of upgrade, and likely the next targets for renovation. They've changed up Urban Jungle to house a lot smaller species than it used to for the most part.
Personally the Northern Frontier hoofstock exhibits aren't that bad, especially considering several rather fractious species are held there so smaller size is better. Most of the larger hoofstock has gone to the Safari Park anyways.
 
I agree with you Pleistocene891 and I was in the process of writing something similar! The San Diego Zoo would be far less attractive if it wasn't for all their great primate and bird exhibits. They also have an amazing reptile and amphibian collection and some of them are even in large outdoor exhibits. In their new Wildlife Explorers Basecamp (which I have not seen) they even have a lot of invertebrate exhibits!
What's so interesting about this is that most AZA zoos seem very reluctant to invest much in monkeys, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates because they don't think that they'll be popular enough to visitors.

Warning, hot take incoming...
The San Diego Zoo should focus on primates, small mammals, birds, reptiles, and other small animals and leave the larger hoofstock, pachyderm, and large carnivore exhibits, with a select few exceptions, to their San Diego Zoo Safari Park facility.
Actually, that may not be such a hot take because it seems to be what they're doing and having success with...
 
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DevinL said:
The San Diego Zoo should focus on primates, small mammals, birds, reptiles, and other small animals and leave the hoofstock, pachyderm, and large carnivore exhibits, with a select few exceptions, to their San Diego Zoo Safari Park facility.
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Should they move from their 100-acre facility to a 40-acre one as well, then? ;)
 
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