Madagascar house - overview

Left side, enclosures for giant bamboo lemur and white-belted-black-and-white ruffed lemur. Right side enclosures for red ruffed lemur and blue-eyed black lemur. In the back is an enclosure with Madagascar fody, parson\'s chameleon, Madagascar girdled lizard, giant day gecko, radiated tortoise and giant leaf gecko and a small terrarium with tomato frog and Seipp\'s day gecko.

What kind of substrate makes up the visitor pathway? Is it a gravel/dirt mixture? I can imagine that such a substance would play havoc with strollers, not to mention that it looks to be a tight squeeze on either side of the central display. Are the lemur exhibits mainly all simple cement floors?

I think it is some type of mulch, but the pathway is broad enough to handle it.

The house is a typical 70/80ies house, but now houses only a fraction of the species that it did before... The indoor enclosures are cement floors, but the outdoor enclosures have natural substrate. But for lemurs this seems less of an issue, as they are mostly higher up in their enclosure.

Their masterplan features a new Madagascar house to be build on the same location nevertheless, as for the animals the house is fine, but it is not appealing to the eye. When this would be built is a questionmark and the zoo has other priorities at the moment.

I visited Cologne Zoo 1980 and they had one of the biggest collection of lemurs in Europe. They also had Uacaris, Black-headed, White and Red, Sakis, Red nosed and Bearded, in this house together with groups of Doucs langur and I think Proboscis monkey and Presbytis melalophos nobilis. Every window on the picture was a single cage then.