A handsome beast

Today, I decided to take the day off and went to Taronga Zoo in advance of the Oceans of Plastic event. Like most people with an interest in conservation and animal welfare, I have mixed feelings about zoos. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need them; unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world and zoos are an increasingly important bastion of biodiversity.

They are also a place where you can go and marvel at nature. And what a marvellous chap this is:

How anyone can look at that and think, “I really must shoot that” (other than with a camera), is totally beyond me.

Oceans of Plastic - Beat the Microbeads (and more)

Tomorrow (Thursday, 20 August 2015 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM (AEST)) there is a Taronga Zoo Science Week event at the zoo: Oceans of Plastic.

I’ll be helping set up through the Sydney Society for Conservation Biology and the event continues the theme of this month’s Conservation Cafe with Prof Emma Johnston, which was on human impacts of marine ecosystems. It was a really interesting morning, and I am looking forwards to learning more.

One thing that struck me that morning was how little I actually knew about the products I used and their impact on the environment. I was shamefully unaware of plastic microbeads in cosmetics like facewash, for example, which are a massive issue.

I’m even more ashamed to say that my (ex-)facewash is on the “Beat the Bead red list” as containing polyethylene (PE) microbeads. I meant to check after the Conservation cafe but completely forgot. This in turn reminded of something else I pondered that day, not just regarding plastic pollution: isn’t it time that we put more pressure on supermarkets to have environmentally aware labelling of products. We already have it for a few things, like tuna (and, sadly, the unhelpful blanket labelling of GM products), but there are so many different considerations - water, energy, waste etc. - that I feel like something more comprehensive is required.

They have asked for questions for tomorrow’s panel, so mine is this:

Could/should we have “environmental impact” traffic lights on goods in supermarkets, akin to the nutritional value traffic lights on food?

I’m not sure if it will get asked but I’ll be interested to hear the panel’s thoughts if it is.

In the meantime, Beat the Microbead have a Warning: Plastics Inside! App. The idea is that you scan or look up your products before you buy. (I tried it on my face scrub and the scan failed but it was in the lookup list.) Alternatively, just go old school and look at the ingredients! (The main ones are: polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA).)

Anyway… if you are in Sydney and looking for a fun and informative (and cheap!) evening, you can get tickets for Oceans of Plastic on Eventbrite.

Caturday Tigers

Taken at Dublin Zoo, December 2007.

Hanging out with the cousins at Monkey World

Continuing the ape theme, back in May we paid a visit to Monkey World in Dorset. It was a visit that was long overdue, as we became quite avid followers of Monkey Business (since superceded by Monkey Life) when we were in Dublin and it had been on our list of places to visit since moving to Southampton. As often happens, I think, the impending move to Australia has motivated a flurry of postponed activities and a birthday provided the final excuse for a visit.

Monkey World is a fantastic place, providing sanctuary for a large number of rescued primates - a shocking number of which come from the shameful UK pet trade - in carefully crafted enclosures.

Glorious Gibbons

Some of my favourites are the various gibbons and the keeper talk was really interesting as they all have quite distinct personalities. Fox (I think it was), for example, is a real show-off and liked to brachiate back and forth at speed in between hanging out at the public end of his enclosure whilst the keeper talk was going on. Fox is a Mueller’s Gibbon - all furry limbs and muscle (above). As anyone who has seen the TV programmes knows, many of the tales of the individual animals are quite touching. If I remember correctly, Nike, a Lars Gibbon (left), for example, was prone to panic attacks following whatever ordeals he experienced in his former life. His mate in Monkey World, however, will come over and give him a cuddle until he feels better.

Watching these animals and seeing how similar to humans they can be in terms of their poses and behaviour (not to mention anatomy), I simply cannot conceive how anyone can seriously doubt that we share ancestry with these magnificent animals.

Lovely Lemurs

One of the best bits of Monkey World is the lemur enclosure. (Ironically, perhaps, as lemurs are not monkeys. Purists will argue that apes are not monkeys either, which is taxonomically true but not really evolutionarily true - monkeys are “polyphyletic” and apes sit in the middle of the two main monkey lineages - Old World and New World. In other words, apes and Old World Monkeys are more closely related to each other than either is to New World Monkeys - so I have no problem in being called a monkey or comments that we descended from monkeys! Anyway, lemurs are actually prosimians and split off from monkeys around 75-80 million years ago.)

The great thing about the lemur enclosure is that you are in there with the lemurs - clearly something that you cannot do with apes - which allows for some really close encounters and views. When we were there, for example, the ruffed lemur (above) was quite happily walking along the fence next to the path, whilst a troop(?) of ring-tailed lemurs were in the trees overhead.

A great day out

Other things that really impressed me about Monkey World were the keeper talks (we went to three!) and how child-friendly the whole place was - they have some awesome playgrounds! The only real disappointment was the food, particularly after visiting Dublin Zoo in the meantime and experiencing their top-notch nosh. There’s a lot of space for picnics and I think that this is the recommended option for a visit - a visit that itself is highly recommended!

Great thinkers of the Ape world

My recent post about Dublin zoo featured the Orang utan, Sibu, in a meditative pose:

It reminded me of an earlier favourite captured by my wife at Durrell Wildife Park (a.k.a. Jersey Zoo) of the resident silverback having a good think:

I wonder what they were thinking about.

A Grand Day Out at Dublin Zoo

When we lived in Dublin, Dublin Zoo was always one of our favourite places to go. Membership is pretty good value and you don’t have to go many times to make it financially worthwhile, not to mention the fact that the money is going to a good cause. Being members also makes a trip to the zoo more enjoyable, I feel: it takes away the pressure to see everything in one trip and encourages more visits. It was therefore great to visit the zoo this week during our trip to Ireland.

This time, we went with my niece and nephew (aged four and two), so the animal priority list was shifted slightly and we headed to the Family Farm first. Like a lot of the zoo, this has changed since our last visit (2007, maybe?) and features fewer guinea pigs and bunnies in favour of more real pigs and other farm animals - including some rather cute piglets (right).

Next up (on my priority list) was my perennial favourite, the Red Pandas. Whilst they eat bamboo and come from China, Red Pandas are actually more closely related to racoons that the Giant Panda, which is a bear. (Their lineage diverged from Giant Pandas somewhere in the order of 40 million years ago, versus 30-35 mya with raccoons and skunks.) Red pandas are a bit less fussy about what they eat than their fellow Carnivora namesakes and, unlike Giant Pandas, do also eat meat (birds, mammals and eggs) although they always look far to laid back to actually hunt for anything, so I am guessing this is primarily by scavenging. Like cats, they are very cute snoozers.

Some excited noises alerted us to the sealions being fed and after watching them chow down for a while, we headed to the ever-charming Meerkat Restaurant for some nosh of our own. This is great for the kids because, in addition to child-friendly food, one wall of the restaurant is a large viewing window in the meerkat enclosure, providing entertainment too. Currently, this entertainment includes three little meerkat cubs (below). I was also impressed by the food itself, which was pretty good for a zoo - freshly cooked real burgers!

After lunch it was time to check out the new African Savanna section of the African Plains area of the zoo. This has been heavily reworked since we were last there and now features an elevated walkway around the giraffe, zebra and rhino enclosures, giving great views and potential close-ups of the giraffes.

Another new development (since our last visit) was the nearby Gorilla Rainforest island (sponsored by Freddy Fyffe’s bananas!) It was great to see the Gorillas have more space to roam and they looked relaxed in their new habitat. I didn’t see the big guy (Harry) but we did see most of the rest of the troop. (The priority spot was little Kituba, who was born a couple of days apart from my nephew, who brought his own gorilla named Kituba to the zoo.)

I didn’t get any pictures of the gorillas but I did get a good one of Sibu, the big male Orang utan, who was seemed to be happily chilling out and possibly pondering the mysteries of life like a Zen master.

Mastering Wildlife Conservation with Marwell Zoo and the University of Southampton

Although it's not quite formalised yet, Southampton has just announced an new Masters in Research course to start in October 2013. The MRes Wildlife Conservation is a joint venture between the University of Southampton and Marwell zoo, and represents a pretty unique opportunity (in the UK at least) to work closely with an active conservation organisation in the UK or Africa.

Result!         [Photos from my September 2010 Marwell Zoo album.]