Sydney Aquarium Dugongs at Sydney Aquarium?

Has a manatee or a Dugong ever been successfully bred in captivity, all the articles on the net I find are vague in saying whether there has been an actual birth,
 
There have been multiple manatee births in europe, in the 70's and 80's in Amsterdam, and other births at Nürnberg, and Berlin in the past. Since then there has been at least one birth at Arnhem, Beauval and Odense and Randers Regnskov has had at least 1 miscarriage.

And Singepore Zoo also had at least one succesfull birth...
 
I can confirm that the plan at the moment is to send the seals at sydney aquarium to sea world and send the dugongs down, the renovation on the seal sanctuary was a few years back and was done when sydney aq was still owned by sydney attractions company. Now they've been bought out by village roadshow money ain't a worry and i wouldn't be suprised that they would want the dugongs here as GSO beats sydney's seal exhibit easy so dugongs gives them something no one else has. As for the plans for breeding no one can assume that they will breed them, at taronga we keep the pair of leopard seals without any plans for breeding them.
 
Hey zooworker, you say " at taronga we keep the pair of leopard seals without any plans for breeding them."
Why?
Why not breed them? It would be a world first and there would be any number of zoos which would love to acquire a young leopard seal.
 
Ara said:
Hey zooworker, you say " at taronga we keep the pair of leopard seals without any plans for breeding them."
Why?
Why not breed them? It would be a world first and there would be any number of zoos which would love to acquire a young leopard seal.
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As just because we keep two of them doesn't mean we want to see the species in captivity in general. The only reason the leopard seals are there is because under law we can't return them to the wild, so we keep them for education. Making the move to breed the pair just to say oh we've bred them isn't the move we want to make. Leopard seals are great to have, but we don't want to breed them for other zoo's just because it goes against our aims for keeping them
 
I think Taronga has every right not to breed them because if another one washes up in Australia where else can it go but there. Maybe if there were a few more institutions that were capable of keeping them then taronga could start thinking about breeding them.
 
The fact is to build new leopard seal facilities cost us 7.5 million just for the leopard seal facilities, i think you'll find not many zoo's would fork out that amount of money for one species of seal. There isn't a high enough stranding rate to justify other zoo's having facilities laid out so we'll be in the same situation as before. I think that the view that just because we have a pair of them we should breed them is true of the past but not the zoo of today, even more so when dealing with rescue/rehab animals
 
Fair enough, zooworker and PAT, a good explanation.
How do you prevent them from breeding? Are they kept separate?
 
Ara said:
Fair enough, zooworker and PAT, a good explanation.
How do you prevent them from breeding? Are they kept separate?
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Simply contraceptive implants, same as many species. The two are kept together, sometimes seperate, we do that to reflect what would occur in the wild, which is mainly living by themselves, however as another animal is enrichment majority of time they are kept together, we do however have the ability to seperate them if the need arises.
 
I agree with PAT's idea, in the mean time Taronga will be a great facility on hand just in case another needs a home,
 
back to the aquarium, does this swap to dugongs mean that they will no longer take in rescue case seals? if they stop taking these seals, becuase i belive that the majority of the seams they had came in as rescue cases, who will? does ocean world manly keep seals?
 
dragon(ele)nerd said:
hmmmm, just asking could Taronga possibly take over this role?
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Taronga has taken rescue seals many times, i point out the two leopards, and no manly stopped keeping seals quite a while ago. With GSO we now have facilites for many more seals so that will not be an issue, at the moment we are minding seals from other facilities as well as our own so there will be no issue there. Most of the seals at sydney aquarium are retired from other facilities.
 
back to the leopard seals shortly. taronga zoo has been studying this species in-situ for many years now. just because you have two seals in an ex-situ situation doesnt mean that breeding becomes an essential research component.
 
glyn said:
back to the leopard seals shortly. taronga zoo has been studying this species in-situ for many years now. just because you have two seals in an ex-situ situation doesnt mean that breeding becomes an essential research component.
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Very true, the leopard seals at the zoo in the past such as Brooke have been used for other areas of reserch that animal training is required for, e.g. shape or colour recognition and other such things. Due the highly successful reserch conducted by the AMMRC breeding is not a priority, also i will point out to all those who believe that studying breeding behaviour in captive situations is viable i will point out that in no way does a captive situation fully reflect a wild situation due to lack of options in terms of mates, lack of selective conditions such as levels of food, temperature and so on and also the constraints of captivity and i say that in the nicest possible way mean that it's easy for two animals to come into contact, so because of that relying on research from captive situations if not viable.
 
Does anyone have any hints on when this could be occuring?
I was at Sydney Aquarium on Saturday and the seals were off display for
renovations/maintainance? Was a bit odd...
 
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