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COOL STUFF
Tongues, trees, and traps: not just any rainforest at the Zoo
By Jennifer Wettlaufer; photos by kc kratt
Just past the bears and before the “Bone Zone” shimmers the Buffalo Zoo’s newest exhibit, the M&T Bank Rainforest Falls. As seen from outside, the shiny building reaches for the sky like so many sun-seeking rainforest plants. Inside, the twenty-five-foot waterfall splashes sight and sound across the main floor and airy interior balcony. Plants and primates mix it up near free-flight motmots and pink roseate spoonbills, and in a tank, toothy piranhas look fast and hungry from any angle. A bouncy rope bridge near the falls offers an alternative walk around what staffer Jennifer Fields calls “the scary stuff.” How scary could it be? Under cool blue lights, vampire bats nestle around dishes of blood and lap it up. While we’re on the subject of tongues, it’s worth pointing out that the fluffy rug in the corner is one of the Zoo’s giant anteaters, fast asleep. Near the sleeping giant walks another of the nosy creatures, past an artificial rock spotted with holes that lead to long tubes loaded with honey. Biologist Jill Odachowski describes the anteater stretch, a daily exercise that takes up about twenty inches of tongue space.
Along with the surprising sights of a white-faced saki monkey and a dwarf caiman that on its hind legs looks like a miniature dinosaur, another experience nudges. Quiet botanical beauty reaches us from rainforest regions. A bromeliad, tucked into the crotch of a tree and looking something like oversized aloe, does not need soil, according to Zoo horticulturalist Steve Mead. The water and nutrients fall into the vase of the plant. A nearby tower tree soars to a height that Mead guesses must be over sixteen feet, as it wouldn’t fit into the greenhouse section of the building. Tower trees, he says, get tall instead of wide and “shoot right through the canopy of the rainforest.” Carnivorous venus flytraps and pitcher plants sit with traps ready, near a cluster of omnivorous plants that Mead says could use insects but don’t need them. Occasional mist sprays—recently changed away from automatic mode and armed with a heads-up to visitors—mimic rains and keep plants hydrated. Staff carry plants damaged by monkey play and other stresses back to the greenhouse section for rehab.
Don’t count on the exhibit to present life forms in a strict vertical format from floor to ceiling in the order of floor, understory, canopy, and emergent layers of a rainforest. Plants originally from the rainforest floor, for example, can be found growing at balcony level in the exhibit. Though the exhibit uses a main-floor approach, it does group species by habitat. Lots of little engineered environments, from treed to swampy to submerged in water, inspire glimpses of neighborhoods two thousand miles away.
The cascading exhibit starts to fell the notion that any one of the thick, wet rainforests dotting the circumference of the planet is just like any other. Plenty of heat and rain, tall trees, and…a flat-topped mountain with a waterfall? During initial meetings to design the exhibit, staff sat around a table bringing up names of animals native to rainforests in Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. “I said, well, this rainforest has no soul,” says Donna Fernandes, president. She said an architect lamented there were no mountains in a rainforest, as model mountains would be handy for hiding animal holding areas. Fernandes had been thinking about a trip years earlier by small aircraft and several boat-hours to just such a place, the nearly three-thousand-foot-tall Angel Falls in the tepui, or flat-topped mountain, region of Venezuela. An exhibit was born. Staff brought in species from eighteen other zoos, and the complex process of introducing the animals to each other began. The exhibit falls was built at about a hundredth the size of Angel Falls, thought to be the tallest in the world and about fifteen times taller than Niagara Falls. Even in miniature, the staff tries to make the environment true to the species found there. “Each tepui can have a species that is found only on that tepui,” says Fernandes. She tells of a storm on the day the exhibit opened, complete with a rainbow stretching over the building. Though Fernandes says a rainforest is too dark for rainbows, she took it as a sign.
Inside the entrance door and before the main exhibit area, the visitor center presents hands-on low-tech interactives like noisemakers and flip signs, and a widescreen video featuring rainforest footage. A dedicated gift shop offers rainforest and sustainability oriented toys and items like wine bags made of unusual materials. Entrance to Rainforest Falls is included with a zoo ticket, and winter and vacation exhibit information can be found at www.buffalozoo.org.
Jennifer Wettlaufer regularly contributes to Spree. As a little girl, she studied Spanish with a teacher from Venezuela and loves to hear its stories.
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