Plants vs Animals, Round 1

From a lifetime of working in zoos, you can probably deduce that I love animals.  I love plants as well.  I love plants with animals.  I just wish that the two would go together a little more smoothly.

When zoos first made their much-heralded transition to naturalistic enclosures for their animals, plants were a big part of the picture.  More specifically, they were the pictures’ frames – and the animals were in the middle, nearby but removed.  It was typical to walk through the zoo and see a maze of lush greenery, with brown islands of animal enclosures scattered about.  The conventional wisdom of the time was simple.  Animals eat plants.  Animals trample plants.  Animals otherwise kill plants.  Ergo, plants and animals don’t mix well in a zoo.

There’s an anecdote that I love in which a zoo director, decades ago, was telling his colleagues about the new gorilla exhibit his zoo was going to open.  It was going to be huge and natural and green, with lots of live plants.  His fellow directors were dubious.  To prove the point, one of them placed a potted plant in a cage, then introduced a gorilla to it.  The gorilla immediately uprooted and ate the plant, then threw it up.  Case closed.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the end of it.  That zoo – Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo – went ahead and opened their new gorilla exhibit to the acclaim of visitors, professionals, and – most importantly – the gorillas.  So you see, it can be done.  It just take a little planning.

The most important factor may very well be space.  The more space your animals have, the less concentrated the beating your plants will get, especially grass.   The lushest, most natural-looking indoor rainforest exhibits I’ve seen, such as Amazonia at the National Zoo and Rainforest at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, have all been big exhibits with relatively small animals in them.  Rainforest buildings that have housed lots of large mammals – such as Tropical Rainforest at Franklin Park Zoo, with Baird’s tapirs and pygmy hippos among others – have had a harder time mixing plants and animals.

Secondly (and this is a trick that Seattle used for the gorillas), give your plants a chance to establish themselves.  A newly planted plant is vulnerable, especially in the presence of curious animals.  Put your plants in the ground, then give them a chance to put some roots down.  It’ll make it more likely that they can bounce back in the face of browsing or trampling.

Pick your plants wisely.  Just like you wouldn’t throw any species of animal into an exhibit just because you thought it looked cool (… I hope), neither should you treat plants the same way.  Pick plants that aren’t too delicate, that can survive/thrive in your local conditions, and are safe for the animals.

That being said, lastly, remember that the animals are the number one priority of a zoo, and destroying plants is, in large part, what animals do.  A bear may demolish a bush looking for hidden tidbits.  An elephant might munch on a tree like an ice cream cone.  A puma marking its territory may claw up a tree trunk.

If you’re worried about your horticultural masterpieces being pulled apart, follow the advice that Zoo Atlanta’s Director Terry Maple gave his team when they were in an uproar over gorillas destroying the nice natural plantings in their spacious new exhibit.

Use cheap plants.