Posted by admin in Animal Fun Facts,Featured,Fun on grounds
Hansel and Lemurbot
Hansel, our resident fossa (pronounced foo-sa), has to be one of the neatest animals you’ll encounter at the zoo. He is quite beautiful and has some amazing adaptations, which is why I refer to him as Handsome.
As a fossa, his habitat in the wild would be the island of Madagascar. (You may also recall the dreaded fossa from the movie of the same name.) Fossa tend to live in dry forests on the island, and they are the largest mammalian (animal with fur) carnivore to inhabit Madagascar.
What do they eat, you ask? Researchers estimate that up to 50% of their diet consists of lemurs. Lemurs!! And in order to catch those lemurs, the fossa have to be extremely skilled at climing, jumping, running, and catching their prey. Their sharp claws allow them to grasp onto tree branches and hang upside down, or walk down a tree trunk head first. They also have sharp teeth that are perfect for tearing and cutting meat.
At the zoo, we give our animals enrichment to keep them mentally and physically stimulated. Sometimes it’s a real treat and we create a lifelike animal for them to tear apart. Awhile back Hansel was presented with an oversized lemur dubbed Lemurbot by staff. Check out the picture of Hansel with his larger-than-life lemur decorated with meat chunks.
For more information on lemurs, take a look at the Duke University Lemur Center, or to get interesting fossa facts, visit the San Diego Zoo’s Animal Bytes.
Posted by admin in Public Programs
Each year the Houston Zoo works together with MD Anderson Children’s Art Project and MDACC (MD Anderson Cancer Center) to have patients from their Children’s Hospital create enrichment for our animals.
Over a series of days, staff members from our education department travel to MDACC to teach the kids about some of the animals that we have at the zoo and what our keepers/trainers do to enrich the lives of our animals.
This year the MDACC kids built three paper mache animals; a red panda, giraffe, and zebra. They also had the opportunity to paint like an animal. What does that mean? They couldn’t use their hands! We had some that held a paint brush in their mouth, another tried to paint using his feet, and we had a brave soul who dunked their nose into the paint and used their nose as the paint brush.
The zoo week culminated with the kids taking a field trip to the zoo yesterday. Three of the kids were able to come out along with their parents and two of their teachers. They were given a guided tour through the zoo, had a behind-the-scenes tour of elephants, and watched their paper mache animals get destroyed by our fossa and male clouded leopard.
While it is difficult to see all of your hard work getting smashed, the kids did get joy out of seeing the animals having so much fun.
Hansel, the fossa inspecting paper mache zebra
Rama, the clouded leopard searching for his treat within the paper mache red panda