EXOTICS NEWS

The latest from the world of exotic pet keeping

Hopefully, all being well, zoos will be allowed to reopen in England as from the 12th April.

Of course this is great news for our zoos, although the timing means that zoos will miss the first part of the crucial Easter period, for the second year in a row.

Zoo Update

ZSL London Zoo

It is planned to close the historic 90-year old Reptile House at London Zoo. A smaller, new reptile house will be built alongside a new indoor facility for the giant Galapagos tortoises. These will be constructed on the site of the current show tent in the court area of the zoo. Planning permission is being sought for this new development, which is hoped to be built in 2022. The new facility is to hold less species, around 29, but these will be species of “conservation concern”. The old reptile house will be re-purposed, with a heritage museum being one of the suggested options.

Bristol Zoo

The zoo`s veterinary team performed an hour-long operation on a 15 year old female giant motoro orange-spot freshwater stingray. She had developed a fast-growing malignant tumour on her tail, so a large part of her tail, including the venomous barb, had to be removed.

Belfast Zoo

Two critically endangered blue-throated macaws arrived from Landau Zoo in Germany and Mulhouse Zoo in France respectively. They have been in quarantine for several weeks before being slowly introduced to each other in their new habitat. Curator, Andrew Hope explained, “Blue-throated macaws are classed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species with recent estimates suggesting less than 250 remain in their natural habitat in Bolivia. Belfast Zoo has a great reputation for our work with endangered birds. We specialise in cockatoos and have had success at breeding red-tailed and white-tailed black cockatoos”. “We hope these stunning new arrivals will prove to be vital additions to the European breeding programme, which is in place to prevent the extinction of these colourful birds. It would be an incredible achievement for the zoo to breed these iconic birds.”

Chester Zoo

A Rothschild`s giraffe was born to female “Orla” on the 12th March, and a female okapi was born to seven year old “K`tusha”, fathered by “Stomp” who is seventeen years old. The calf has been named “Nia Nia” after a small village located in the centre of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are currently 76 okapi in European zoos.

Black Rhino Release Programme

UK-born eight year old female

Eastern black Rhino “Chanua” has been sent to Port Lympne where she will join two others on the first stage of her long journey to Tanzania. She was chosen to be part of Flamingoland`s black rhino release programme the “Udzungwa Forest Project” (UFP). She will be the second black rhino to be translocated from there to Africa, the first was “Olmoti” who was sent to a National Park in Rwanda previously. The rhinos will eventually make the epic journey to Tanzania where they will join wild rhinos.

Rescued Orang-Utans Released

Ten rescued orang-utans have been sent from the sanctuaries where they had been living back to the wild. In total five males, a mother with two infants and two other females were released in the Bukit Batikap Protection Forest in Murung Raya, Central Kalimantan Province in the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo. They were flown by helicopter deep into the forest, this was to avoid the risk of possible covid-19 transmission to the apes. Some of the orangs had been in rehabilitation since 2006. There are only estimated to be around 100,000 Bornean orangutans left in the wild, according to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half the population being depleted over the past 60 years. They have suffered from illegal poaching, as well as destruction of habitat due to large-scale logging and replacement of forests with cash crops such as palm oil.

Non-Invasive ECG for Apes

One of the major causes of mortality in the great apes in zoos is from heart disease and strokes. So these days zoos want to be more proactive in tackling this problem and in order to reduce the risk zoos have been greatly improving the diets of chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans, but keeping an eye on the animals heart-health has always still been very difficult, with animals having to be sedated to safely monitor their conditions, which in itself carries a huge risk. Until now. Scientists have recently been working on the development of a non-invasive, passive, method of heart monitoring in these primates. With this in mind, an innovative mobile electro-cardiogram (ECG) device has been developed, known as the ”Kardiamobile”. The unit can be attached to the outside of an enclosure, which the animals can be trained to use via operant conditioning methods. With only a small amount of pressure from the fingers of the animal on the device it is able to detect any abnormalities in the heart rhythm or the electrical activity of the heart. This incredibly simple device is being welcomed by zoos and when this innovative welfare tool is more widely available it will surely become an invaluable part of monitoring the health of all anthropoid apes in captivity.

New Snake Discovery

Mud snakes (family Homalopsidae) live in wetlands across Southeast Asia. Their habitats include natural swamps and open lands flooded during the rainy season, typically rice paddies. Scientists of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt and the East Yangon University have now discovered a new species in a wetland near the university campus. “We collected four individuals with short tails during fieldwork. We could not assign them to any known mud snake species,” explains Prof. Dr. Gunther Köhler, herpetologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt.

Morphological analyses initially showed that the individuals are closely related to the mud snake