Edinburgh Zoo Edinburgh Zoo News 2013

glasgowanimal said:
22 chimps after Budongo opened and sadly down to 18

Plus no success with breeding so far....
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Which has died most recently?

Ricky was over 50, so his death wasn't unexpected, and I recall the dominant male from the Dutch group died not long after the integration.

They had two births in 2012 and I think one in 2011, but obviously no survivors
 
Davef68 said:
Which has died most recently?

Ricky was over 50, so his death wasn't unexpected, and I recall the dominant male from the Dutch group died not long after the integration.

They had two births in 2012 and I think one in 2011, but obviously no survivors
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Ricky and Lynsey from Edinburgh group...Klaus and Renee from new group
 
I make that 17 then, as there are 19 listed here, minus Lynsey and Rene.

Meet Our Chimps!

EDIT - Some research!

Bram was the other Dutch one that died. He died fairly early on in December 2010, abd Claus died under anesthetic in February 2012. If Rene has also died, that make only 17.

There are some posts from Lesley4444 in November 2012 about the chimp deaths.

The web pages for those that have died still up, but not linked.

http://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/attractions/budongo/MeetOurChimps/Claus.html

http://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/attractions/budongo/MeetOurChimps/Bram.html

http://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/attractions/budongo/MeetOurChimps/Ricky.html


Lyndsey was the one they were hoping would show the Dutch females how to raise a baby, so her death is a double blow.
 
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'The birth of a panda cub could generate as much as £48m for the Scottish economy – but panda births can be tricky'


Panda-monium at Edinburgh zoo | World news | The Guardian

Oscar Marsh, aged 10, already has plans for the panda toy he has just been bought from the gift shop at Edinburgh zoo, which is filled with row after row of pandas in tartan skirts, panda toffees, panda-shaped shortbread tins, panda hats and earmuffs. There is even a baby panda onesie.

Oscar's new £15 bear will have a naming ceremony, but not just yet. "I'm going to wait until the baby is born to name it after that; name it after the real panda," the 10-year-old, on holiday from Hampshire, said with conviction.

Edinburgh zoo is enjoying a burst of panda-mania. Within the next 10 days, the zoo could be home to the first giant panda cub to be born in the UK. There may even be two.

Economists predict that one panda cub alone could earn Edinburgh and the Scottish economy an extra £48m over the next 10 years: of all 17 "panda cities" worldwide now hosting giant pandas, Edinburgh is one of the smallest, so the impact the birth is likely to have on its tourism is proportionally larger.

The zoo expects its visitor numbers to double to around 1.2m. The Holiday Inn next door has its eye on the market, advertising its "panda packages" to passing motorists.

Advance tickets surged when the zoo announced there was clear evidence that Tian Tian, who arrived with her putative mate, Yang Guang, just before Christmas in 2011, was pregnant. Even though panda fans have been warned that Tian Tian is now off show while she sleeps and nests, her enclosure was fully booked last week.

A successful birth is far from certain despite the carefully cultivated expectation the zoo has built up since the excitement in April over its attempts to get Tian Tian to mate with Yang Guan.

While Tian Tian has had twins before, giant pandas can reabsorb their foetuses; it could be still-born, or Tian Tian could be fooling the world with a phantom pregnancy (now a decreasing possibility, thanks to the zoo's careful monitoring of her hormone levels and behaviour). The zoo will only know for sure she is giving birth 24 hours in advance.

At birth, a panda cub is pink, with sparse white hair, and minute, weighing around 150g or just one thousandth of its mother's weight – the birth itself can take just minutes. It can take several weeks before they will crawl or mewl, and up to 45 days before their eyes start to open. But then they will rapidly grow and bulk up, their weight increasing tenfold within six weeks. Even so, they remain vulnerable for several months: it can be up to 80 days before they are able to stand and walk and five months before they start mimicking their mother's behaviour, eating bamboo and climbing trees.

With Tian Tian's due date so close, the zoo is disclosing little to the outside world; its senior staff are refusing to be interviewed. Tian Tian's enclosure is shut to visitors and she is in virtual seclusion as her behaviour and hormones are carefully monitored.

Henry Nicholls, author of The Way of the Panda, warns that infant mortality rates among captive pandas are significant, ranging from 20% to 40%.

Last year, at Smithsonian's National Zoo, in Washington, in the US, Mei Xiang, lost her cub a week after its birth, after her sixth pregnancy, although shehe has just had another cub.

The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) has a tight, two-year window to maximise its returns: in 2015, any cub will be repatriated to China to begin its own captive breeding. (In the wild, a juvenile panda will leave its mother to strike out on its own soon after it turns two.)

After Yang Guang and Tian Tian failed to mate in April, the zoo called in some help. It flew in panda experts from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin and the China Conservation and Research Centre for Giant Pandas in Wolong to artificially inseminate Tian Tian with Yang Guang's sperm and that of a now dead donor male from Berlin, Bao Bao.

The RZSS has extracted a good deal from the Chinese. While it pays the Wolong institute $1m a year for Tian Tian and Yang Guang, and has trade-marked their anglicised names, Sunshine and Sweetie, the zoo has got any cubs for free. Nicholls said other zoos generally pay a royalty for each one born, a fee of around $500,000 a cub.

Nicholls has reservations about the zoo's argument that captive breeding helps conserve the endangered species in the wild. The only time the Chinese tried to reintroduce a captive panda into the wild, it was mauled to death. He believes, instead, that politics and economics drive the panda business.

"There is no evidence to suggest that reintroducing captive pandas will actually help wild pandas," he said. "It's similar to badger culling [in England]; it's a bit of a leap of faith without any scientific underpinning."

That is contested by the RZSS, which is holding a panda conservation symposium next month. Chinese experts have now embarked on a long-term reintroduction project, focusing on females.

Nicholls believes the hype surrounding the cubs over-simplifies issues about conserving wild habitats and the role of zoos.

"Their role in appealing to children is very, very important," he said. "But a lot of adults respond in a very infant-like way to pandas, which really isn't that helpful because they perform a simplification role. Adults need to be reminded that while we've got some captive pandas, how does that actually help us?"

Even WWF, the global conservation charity, which uses a giant panda as its logo, has reservations about the usefulness of captive breeding. It stresses the need to protect pandas' natural habitat in south-west China. There are 350 pandas in captivity and 1,500 worldwide.

Giant panda - WWF UK

"The long-term survival of giant pandas depends on there being enough intact and continuous forest for them to be able to safely roam, feed and mate," John Barker, WWF's programme manager for India and China said. "Habitat destruction is the main threat to this species and we believe captive breeding alone isn't the most effective method for their conservation."
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They got the little bit wrong about 'taking several weeks before they can crawl or mewl'. As we know, they can squawk very loudly, almost from birth. It seems to be an inhibitory mechanism to safeguard a big mother from squashing such a tiny cub.
 
More speculation on the economic impact:

Edinburgh's pandas: a baby may not set the turnstiles spinning

Edinburgh zoo is on standby for the birth of a panda cub to Tian Tian, but will it lead to record visitors? One expert report suggests the zoo should lower its sights as panda power can wane

Edinburgh's pandas: a baby may not set the turnstiles spinning | UK news | theguardian.com

One glance around the gift shop at Edinburgh zoo is proof enough of the economic weight of panda power; recently expanded to near double its shelf space, the open area cum ticket hall is dominated by panda memorabilia.

There are shelves and baskets crammed to bursting with plush panda cuddly bears, some in kilts, others without; panda sweeties; panda caps and hats; "panda tartan" bags and silk voile scarves. There are even fate-tempting panda bears with cubs attached. You can spend £2.50 on a wooden panda keyring or £175 on a "Jura" panda tartan shoulder bag.

The hefty merchandising push by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland to maximise the charisma and appeal of Tian Tian and her erstwhile mate Yang Guang – backed up by the hard-nosed decision to seek a wide-ranging copyright to ban anyone else using their Anglicized names of Sunshine and Sweetie - appeared fully justified by its far healthier finances last year.

But will the expected cub (or two) likely to be born to Tian Tian in the next week lead to another great surge in income and profits for the RZSS? An expert report on the economic value of Edinburgh's pandas again being cited in the media (thanks to the new surge in panda cub hype) suggests not.

In fact, the Scottish Enterprise-funded study believes a new cub might not be as valuable as one might suppose or as valuable as the zoo itself believes.

In May, the zoo confirmed that its receipts and profits had been sharply boosted last year when visitor numbers rose by 51% to 810,000, thanks largely to Sunshine and Sweetie, with the RZSS's income jumping by more than £5m to nearly £15m.

That extra income was crucial to the RZSS, which had in the previous year suffered a £1.2m deficit and been forced to seek hefty bank loans to bolster its books, amid other senior management disputes during 2010 and 2011.

Its chief executive, Chris West, predicted then that a cub would again boost its income and ticket sales by the same amount, therefore pushing its visitor numbers to about 1.2m for the first time – doubling its pre-panda figures.

That would briefly bring Edinburgh zoo within touching distance of matching Edinburgh castle's record-topping annual visits of 1.2m last year (the castle had 1.3m visitor in 2011).

But that prediction is challenged by the report by the Bellshill-based Frontline consultancy for Scottish Enterprise. It did produce a startling headline figure about the potential, best-case scenario for the city's economy.

It suggests that, assuming there was really intense worldwide promotion of the new panda family by all Edinburgh's tourism bodies, public agencies and conference companies, including heavily-marketed "panda days" and commercial sponsorship deals, the city could earn an extra £27.6m from a single panda cub.

But Frontline also analysed the impact of panda cubs arriving in other Western zoos on the zoos themselves, and discovered that visitor figures to the zoo itself actually fell from their first year peak, when the adult pandas first arrived. And that was a consistent picture.

Melbourne zoo, the only one in the southern hemisphere with a panda cub, suffered a financial crisis after its birth. So the RZSS would not itself grow any richer. It seems counter-intuitive.

Frontline analysed three scenarios about how heavily the pandas and a theoretical cub might be promoted: "minimum impact", "limited impact" and "panda premium", for both pandas with and without a cub. Surprisingly, it predicts that even where a cub arrives, in the top two scenarios visitor numbers fall by at least 130,000 from the record-breaking heights a zoo enjoys in the first year of the adult pandas being on show.

In the "premium" scenario, the one which could earn Edinburgh an extra £27.6 in income and assumes a cub was born and went on show in 2013, visitor figures would fall from their 963,000 peak in 2012 (the first year that cub-less Tian Tian and Yang Guang went on show) to 825,000 in 2013 and again to 756,000 in 2014.

Only in the most pessimistic "minimum impact" scenario, one where the zoo and the city authorities do the very least to promote the pandas, does a cub boost visitor numbers – but only just over the first year record level. Under that set-up, they go from a 784,300 peak down to 620,600 but then briefly jump up again the next year (when the pandas are on show for a full year) to 794,600.

Fielding questions on behalf of Frontline, a spokeswoman for Scottish Enterprise told the Guardian:

In all cases the initial arrival of the pandas led to a massive surge in interest, effectively shifting the zoos from being ones of regional or national importance to ones of global significance (note that pandas can only be found in 16 places in the world outside of China, and Edinburgh Zoo is one of them).

Following this initial surge in interest the number of visitors has, in all cases, started to dip down again, while staying above the levels they were at prior to the arrival of the pandas. While the arrival of a cub undoubtedly has a very big impact on the zoos in terms of extra visitor numbers, it is generally not large enough to bring them back up to the big year one visitor figure.

Frontline added:

In every scenario we modelled, we have assumed a massive jump in visitor numbers in the year following the arrival of the first panda, followed by a gradual decline back to the original pre-panda numbers over the following ten years (this is the experience of all of the other panda zoos that we looked at).

In all cases, the arrival of the panda cub helps to keep the visitor number up close to the year one peak, but is never quite enough to take them above that peak.

Yet a cub will have longer-lasting economic value: even after it two year stint at Edinburgh ends (cubs are sent "home" to China aged two, to mirror their behaviour in the wild when they leave their mothers), the cub-effect lasts.

And there is always the chance Tian Tian will have more during her 10 years in Scotland, so Frontline estimates visitor numbers will remain healthily high at as much as 733,000 a year:

There are two reasons for this.

The first is that, in many of the cases we looked at, the panda couple went on to successfully produce further cubs over the course of the ten year period, leading to other regular bursts in visitor numbers over the course of the ten year period (we have smoothed out some of these impacts, rather than trying to second guess when every birth would be).

The second is that, even after the cubs leave, the marketing impact that it will have given the zoos will to an extent still be there. For example the famous 'cub sneezing' clip on YouTube is still receiving large numbers of hits, and generating publicity for National Zoo Washington, even though the cub is no longer physically there.

So the numbers suggest panda power is still significant, and would be enough to justify Edinburgh's hefty institutional and reputational investment.

But there is a sting. Intriguingly, the report, finished in early 2012 but released in June last year, over-estimated Edinburgh zoo's first year visitor figures by about 130,000, another hint that the public appetite for pandas is lower than might be expected.
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Note it mentions Melbourne Zoo and says they have a cub. Of course it is Adelaide who has pandas and they haven't had a cub.
 
Edinburgh Zoo is old and shabby, it has a good penguin exhibit and a first class chimp house, apart from that there is nothing outstanding in this zoo, a zoo that is in a capital city, on entry now, you are faced with a very old sealion pool, although still with water, nothing in it. It has various hoofstock animals which naturally are of interest to members of zoochat, it is also on a very steep hill, not exactly visitor friendly, especially to those visitors with pushchairs and those getting on a bit, when you eventually climb to the top of this zoo, apart from admiring the magnificent view, there is not much else of interest, of coarse they now have giant pandas, with a gift shop almost entirely consisting of overpriced panda merchandice, you cannot even view these animals at liberty on your visit, you have to have "panda pass", that is if they are actualy on view on the day of your visit at all, Edinburgh Zoo is helping save the giant panda, is it not a case of the giant panda helping Edinburgh Zoo, after of coarse their £12,000 a week has been paid to the Chinese rent man.
 
TARZAN said:
Edinburgh Zoo is old and shabby, it has a good penguin exhibit and a first class chimp house, apart from that there is nothing outstanding in this zoo, a zoo that is in a capital city, on entry now, you are faced with a very old sealion pool, although still with water, nothing in it. It has various hoofstock animals which naturally are of interest to members of zoochat, it is also on a very steep hill, not exactly visitor friendly, especially to those visitors with pushchairs and those getting on a bit, when you eventually climb to the top of this zoo, apart from admiring the magnificent view, there is not much else of interest,
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Tibetan Golden Cats, Sun Bears, a Clouded Leopard and the best gibbon enclosure in the UK would all like to protest at your assertion they are not particularly interesting or outstanding ;)
 
Did I get that right, if you make a visit to the zoo, you are not allowed to see the pandas when you haven't booked a special time frame for that day weeks before your visit?
 
Species wise, yes the mammal collection is virtually un-rivalled in the UK.
Budongo, the penguin enclosure, Maji-Mzuri, sun bear enclosure, gibbon enclosure, gelada enclosure, Asian lion enclosure, Steller's sea eagle aviary, living links, magic forest and the African plains enclosure are probably the best enclosures.
With some imagination and cash Whitson woods, brilliant birds, Indian rhino enclosure (but not for rhino), rock dens, top of the hill paddocks, rock hyrax enclosure, pygmy hippo/cassowary enclosure, former wolf wood, flamingo aviary and a redesign for the banteng/warty pig/binturong area, could be brought up to scratch.
Work is needed as Tarzan suggests, too many shabby areas, untouched from the 70's/80's.
And as i have expressed in other threads, just rip down the monkey house.
 
TARZAN said:
Edinburgh Zoo is old and shabby, it has a good penguin exhibit and a first class chimp house, apart from that there is nothing outstanding in this zoo, a zoo that is in a capital city, on entry now, you are faced with a very old sealion pool, although still with water, nothing in it. It has various hoofstock animals which naturally are of interest to members of zoochat, it is also on a very steep hill, not exactly visitor friendly, especially to those visitors with pushchairs and those getting on a bit, when you eventually climb to the top of this zoo, apart from admiring the magnificent view, there is not much else of interest, of coarse they now have giant pandas, with a gift shop almost entirely consisting of overpriced panda merchandice, you cannot even view these animals at liberty on your visit, you have to have "panda pass", that is if they are actualy on view on the day of your visit at all, Edinburgh Zoo is helping save the giant panda, is it not a case of the giant panda helping Edinburgh Zoo, after of coarse their £12,000 a week has been paid to the Chinese rent man.
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Sorry, but i can't agree with most of your view of Edinburgh zoo(except perhaps the panda viewing situation).
It's enclosures may not be outstanding, but it's collection is superior to another capital city zoo in the UK, over which i'd easily choose Edinburgh at the current time!
 
Maybe it's coming from flat-as-a-pancake Essex, but personally I find Edinburgh's hilly site exhilarating. That view at the top overlooking the Firth, with a view of the Castle, quite simply is the finest backdrop offered by any UK zoo that I have visited.

If Edinburgh can crack (and I use that word advisedly, with all the rocks there!) a way of using the land at the top of the Zoo it will be a very high-class site indeed.
 
Jola said:
Did I get that right, if you make a visit to the zoo, you are not allowed to see the pandas when you haven't booked a special time frame for that day weeks before your visit?
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You can get in to see the giant pandas unbooked, space permitting. Yesterday, 2.9.13. I went to the zoo, panda tickets not booked as I wasn't really that concerned about getting in or not, when visiting a zoo I like to do what I want, when I want, and not be told when I can view a certain exhibit and for how long. I was informed at the paybox by a young lady when paying to get in that there was no giant panda viewing at all yesterday, the reason I was given was that the female was off show because hopefully she is pregnant, the male was off show because he was ill, fair enough, I have no problem with that, it was no major disappointment, but to other visitors perhaps the same could not be said. I did observe a sign outside the zoo entrance when we left stating that there were no unbooked giant panda tickets available for that day, there was no mention of the animals being off show, what happened yesterday to people who had taken the trouble to book passes in advance, I do not know, as the exhibit was closed to the public all of yesterday.
 
TeaLovingDave said:
Tibetan Golden Cats, Sun Bears, a Clouded Leopard and the best gibbon enclosure in the UK would all like to protest at your assertion they are not particularly interesting or outstanding ;)
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Yes Dave, I previously stated in agreement that Edinburgh had a first class gibbon enclosure, and indeed it has,Clouded leopard is an interesting and outstanding animal, pity you cannot say the same about the enclosure it resides in at the Ediburgh Zoo, and as for the sun bears, the enclosure is nothing great, just Mercedes old den tarted up a bit, and also yesterday I noticed one of these animals pacing consistently inside the sleeping quarters, I am not suggesting that it did it all day but I observed it doing this on the four occasions that I observed it yesterday, I understand that both these animals came from a less than ideal background and it was good of Edinburgh Zoo to give them a home, but where they are living is not exactly ideal. Another thing, the flamingos, I am pleased that this enclosure is netted over thus not having to have the birds pinioned
 
I can understand the whole hill thing. Smithsonian has a gigantic hill that pretty much separates Asia Trail, the Cheetah Conservation Station, and the bird house from the rest of the zoo. It's an absolute pain in the a** to walk up and many don't even bother unless they're bent on seeing the Giant Pandas. The funny thing it that the main entrance to the zoo is on the top of that hill but most enter from the back areas, as I did.

~Thylo:cool:
 
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