It's difficult for me to wrap my head around the concept of a National Zoo without the giant pandas. One of the ongoing discussions I've heard people have about the move is, "What's next?" For half a century, pandas were the stars of the zoo, to say nothing of the anchor of the Asia Trail complex. The void that the bears leave behind them isn't just emotional - it's very much physical as well. What will the zoo do now that they are gone?
The ideal answer in their eyes would be, "Get more pandas." Still, with Sino-American relations being what they are at the moment, that might be a while coming. So it would be time to dust of Plan B... and maybe take a quick look at C and D as well. And maybe E.
Historically, this might not have been as big of a problem. Zoo exhibits up until the later part of the twentieth century used to be fairly standard issue - a floor of concrete or tiles or hard-packed dirt, and some bars. There would be some variations in size and shape. Some cages would be roofed, to keep animals that were good climbers or jumpers in, some might have a pool, but most were pretty similar. Animals came from the wild then, often of uncertain health to begin with, and our understanding of exotic animal husbandry was fairly rudimentary. There was a lot of turnover, so to speak, so a cage might hold very different animals from one year to the next. Maybe it would have a lion one year, than a chimp after the lion passed on, and then maybe a porcupine or something.
Today, exhibits are often tailor-made with specific species in mind. It's often not enough to design an enclosure for a big cat - an exhibit made especially for a cheetah is going to look differently than one planned for a jaguar. The jaguars would benefit from having a pool and more climbing structures, whereas the cheetahs would do best with more open space to promote their having a good view of surrounding areas, as well as space to run a lure. That makes it a fair bit trickier to swap species. Suppose that the National Zoo decided that it wanted to move its tigers into the panda exhibit of Asia Trail - or maybe bring in snow leopards. Unlike pandas, those species are excellent jumpers, and snow leopards are great climbers. An exhibit designed to house pandas - with minimal barriers to promote viewing of the pandas - wouldn't hold those species. A snow leopard could clear the moat and escape. And since the zoo is hoping to have pandas again at some point, there's a limit to how much modification they'd want to make to the exhibit to accommodate a temporary occupant.
It's also not just a question of the exhibit working - there's also the back-of-house aspect. The outdoor exhibit might work well for Asian hoofstock, especially something that likes rocky, hilly terrain, such as takin or markhor. The indoor holding spaces, however, aren't stalls for hoofed mammals, they are dens for carnivores, and would be inappropriate and poorly-suited to those species. Again, the zoo would have to decide how much modification they'd want to make if they were to put in a different species, especially if the goal is to go back to pandas some day.
There's also theming in zoo exhibits these days, which wasn't necessarily a thing a few decades ago. The panda exhibit is in Asia Trail. The species that occupies it should, theoretically, be Asian. If the zoo wanted to add, say, American black bears to the exhibit, it wouldn't work out for that reason.
Zoos do, of course, lose species, and often times they will plug in a different species instead of tearing down and rebuilding. As polar bears have become less available in recent years, many zoos have switched over to keeping brown bears in those exhibits, simply lowering the pools (though Philadelphia turned their polar bear exhibit over to penguins, while Indianapolis turned their exhibit into one for macaques). Likewise, as many zoos have shifted away from keeping elephants, rhinos have been a popular replacement (white or black for the African elephants, Indian to replace the Asian). There's still some modifications that always need to be made, but it's at least manageable.
As to what the National Zoo will do to fill the space left the pandas? I'm very curious to see.
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